2026 - Edition 103 | August 11

New version allows you to compare trajectories according to parents' income and birth groups, in addition to relating mobility to local conditions

Olá Leitor,

Understanding why opportunities are so unevenly distributed in Brazil is at the heart of the mission of the Institute for Mobility and Social Development - IMDS. By producing and disseminating knowledge about social mobility, IMDS seeks to contribute to public policies that reduce the influence of conditions of origin on people's trajectories.

In June 2025, in issue 73 of the Letter from IMDS, we announced the launch of the Atlas of Social Mobility, developed by IMDS in partnership with Prospera Lab. Through interactive maps and visualizations, the platform began to present detailed estimates of intergenerational income mobility for different territories and groups of the Brazilian population.

At the time, we showed that two out of three children of parents in the bottom half of the distribution remained in the same income bracket when they reached adulthood, while less than 2% reached the richest 10%. The results also revealed great differences between Brazilian territories.

Now, we present a new version of the Atlas, which expands the possibilities of analyzing inequality of opportunities in Brazil. The estimates are based on the methodology described in the academic article Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality (Britto et al., 2025), which connects children and parents through administrative records and relates family income during childhood to the results achieved in adult life. The methodology and aggregated data are available on the platform for consultation and download.

An important novelty is the inclusion of new cutouts of family income of origin. In addition to the children of parents located below the median of the national income distribution, the Atlas now presents results for the children of families located among the poorest 25%, among the children of middle-income parents (between the 26th and 75th percentiles) and among the richest 25%. These groups are defined by national distribution, allowing people with similar positions of origin in different parts of the country to be compared.

The new cutouts allow us to observe both the rise of those born into poverty and the trajectories of the children of parents in the intermediate income bracket and the permanence of those who already start from the top. Among people born between 1983 and 1990, the probability of being among the richest 25% in adulthood is only 8.3% for the children of the poorest 25%. This proportion rises to 17.6% among children from middle-income families and reaches 56.5% among children from the richest 25%.

Thus, less than one in ten children from the poorest families reaches the richest quarter of the population. Among the children of the richest families, more than half remain in this position in adult life. The chance of being among the richest 25% is almost seven times greater for those born among the richest 25% than for those born among the poorest 25%.

Family income does not absolutely determine the destiny of each person but strongly conditions their opportunities. The results reinforce the portrait of a society strongly stratified by income of origin, both because of the difficulty of ascension for those born in poverty and because of the high permanence among the richest.

Even among those who come from similar economic conditions, opportunities vary according to sex, skin color/race and place of childhood experience. Among the children of the poorest 25%, the chance of reaching the richest 25% is 11.5% among white people and 7.5% among non-whites. Among men, this proportion is 11.7%, compared to 4.9% among women.

The new version of the Atlas of Social Mobility also makes it possible to compare children born between 1983 and 1987 and between 1988 and 1990. The results point to moderate changes in the direction of greater mobility: among the children of the poorest 25%, the probability of reaching the richest 25% increased from 7.9% to 8.8%, while among the children of the richest 25%, the permanence at the top fell from 58.9% to 53.9%. Still, the hierarchy associated with parents' income remains steep.

The new cutouts also deepen the territorial reading already offered by the Atlas. Among the children of the poorest 25%, the chances of reaching the richest 25% are generally higher in the South, Southeast and part of the Midwest, while much of the North and Northeast have lower probabilities. The platform allows you to observe how the rise of the poorest and the permanence among the richest vary across the territory.

The Atlas also incorporates 38 municipal socioeconomic indicators, organized in the areas of education, health, economy, society and public spending. This new dimension allows us to investigate which local characteristics appear associated with higher or lower levels of mobility and to understand how different contexts relate to opportunities for ascension.

Among the municipal socioeconomic indicators incorporated into the Atlas, education appears as the dimension most associated with social mobility. Municipalities with better educational indicators, such as higher IDEB and lower age-grade distortion, tend to have greater chances of upward mobility.

By combining family origin, birth groups, territory and local context, the Atlas allows us to investigate for whom, where and under what conditions social mobility occurs in Brazil.

We invite you to get to know and explore the new version of the Atlas of Mobility. We hope that the new cutouts will contribute to deepen the debate on equal opportunities and to guide policies that reduce the weight of family origin and territory on the future of Brazilians.

See you in the next "IMDS Letter"!

Paulo Tafner
CEO