Nearly nine million Californians - almost a quarter of the state's residents - live in poverty under a revised federal formula.

California's highest-in-the-nation 23.5 percent poverty rate under the "supplemental poverty measure" developed by the Census Bureau is ahead of Washington D.C.'s 23.2 percent and  Florida's 19.5 percent.

Devised a year ago, this measure provides a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out.