Recent studies on poverty trends in South Africa suggest that poverty increased in the 1990s, before a continuous downward trend took place after 2000. This study augments the income and expenditure-based literature by examining poverty trends using household assets and services. We consider numerous private assets, household service variables, and educational attainment in order to derive a non-income welfare index. Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to create an asset index and investigate the changes in non-income welfare across household income quintiles between 1993 and 2010. The results indicate large and statistically significant decreases in poverty, where the extent of this decline is more significant in the poorer quintiles and among female-headed households.