Respondents were randomly assigned descriptions of families with varying incomes and other characteristics and asked to judge the standard of living of these stimulus families. There is considerable agreement in these judgments. The method yields the income level which is associated with each standard of living and an equivalence scale for adjusting these amounts for differences in household characteristics. The results indicate that the public's judgment of the poverty line is very close to the official level, although the equivalence scales produced by this and other subjective methods imply that the costs of additional family members are much less than those suggested by official scales.