Purpose: As household characteristics are differently associated with poverty within population sub-groups, the present study examines the determinants of household poverty by gender and age of a household heads in Korea. Research design, data, and methodology: The present study examines the association between a vector of household demograpic and socioeconomic characteristics and poverty. Specifically, sample household survey is decomposed into male and female headed households, and elderly and non-elderly headed households to assess how attributes to poverty vary depending on population sub-goups. For empirical analysis, this study draws upon the recent national representative household data, survey of household finance and living conditions (SFLC) 2021 collected by Korea Statistical Office. Results: Three findings are highlighted; (1) household head’s age is prone to poverty for the non-elderly male-headed households but not for the non-elderly female headed households, partly reflecting relative weakness in earning power of female in labour market.; (2) the type of Job occupation of a household head has different effects on the elderly male and the elderly female households; (3) a hump-shape relationship between a household head’s age and poverty, partly capturing the life-cycle income hypothesis, is only observed from the non-elderly households whilst the relationship was linear for the elderly household. Finally we found that education played a role for the elderly household from anti-poverty perspective but not for the non-elderly household. Implications: Some findings suggests policy implication related to poverty relief. For example, the different age effect of poverty between the non-elderly male and the non-elderly female headed households for partly implies the weakness of earning power in income generating activities and suggests a government anti-poverty intervention should be taken into account wage differential stemming from gender discrimination in labour market.