New stochastic dominance (SD) tests of richness and poorness are applied to income and expenditure distributions in the Philippines to measure relative welfare levels and investigate sources of inequality from 2000 to 2012. We successfully demonstrate that welfare analyses based on ascending and descending SD principles offer a stronger characterisation of changing levels of welfare in a population than what could be obtained using standard SD approach alone. Empirically, our results show that large improvements in relative welfare over time in the Philippines favoured older and female‐headed households, mainly in the urban areas. Further, female headship and more years in education promoted higher welfare within and among the population groups. On the other hand, the growth of remittance incomes may have caused the greater imbalance in the distributions found in more recent years. Analysis by age groups meanwhile showed that over time, there are increasing concentrations of poorer households among the youngest cohort (30 and under), at the same time that there are also increasing concentrations of richer households among the over 60s. The combined impact of these factors provides a viable explanation as to why the gap between the rich and the poor has remained high in the Philippines for a very long time now.