Median household income in the U.S. stalled in 2018, even as median earnings rose and the poverty rate fell to its lowest level in nearly two decades, according to new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The median household income was $63,179 last year, statistically insignificant from the median of $62,626 in 2017. The share of people who had no health insurance also rose for the first time in about a decade, even as workers' median earnings increased 3.4% and an additional 2.3 million people became full-time, year-round workers.

"We have found quite a big increase in full-time, year-round work that would tend to bring up incomes for working people," Trudi Renwick, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said Tuesday in a call with reporters.

However, after adjusting for changes to the agency's data collection and analysis methods, Renwick said the median household income in 2018 was "not statistically different from either 2007, the year before the most recent recession, or 1999, which is (the) peak income year in our historical timesets."

The poverty rate was 11.8% in 2018, its lowest mark since 2001 and the first time the rate has been significantly lower than it was in 2007, the new data shows. Across the U.S., there were 1.4 million fewer people living in poverty last year than in 2017, but recovery has been sluggish in some parts of the country. The South was the only region not to see its poverty rate fall between 2017 and 2018.

Meanwhile, the supplemental poverty rate – which considers the effect of public programs like refundable tax credits and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and serves as a broader indicator of the nation's economic well-being – was 13.1% last year, not significantly different from 2017, the new data shows . Sixteen states and the District of Columbia saw supplemental poverty measures higher than their official poverty rates.

The new data indicates that in 2018, Social Security "continued to be the most important anti-poverty program, moving 27.3 million individuals out of poverty," according to the Census Bureau .

Health insurance coverage trends also shifted between 2017 and 2018, with the uninsured rate rising from 7.9% to 8.5% for the first year-over-year increase since 2009, according to the Census Bureau. That uptick was largely driven by a decline in public health coverage for low-income people, with Medicaid enrollment falling 0.7 percentage points to 17.9% in 2018.

Most people get their health insurance through their employers, and roughly two-thirds of people were privately insured in 2018. The share of people insured through Medicare – which primarily covers adults 65 and older and disabled people – rose by 0.4 percentage points to 17.8%, due in large part to the country's aging population.

In all, there were 27.5 million people – including about 4.3 million children – who lacked health insurance for the entirety of 2018.