Unlocked is a new series focused on explaining U.S. federal government systems, structures, and processes. This SNAP explainer is part of that series, which is produced by The Journalist’s Resource and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where JR is housed.
In late May, House Republicans voted to send legislation to the Senate — the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — that would cut federal taxes by trillions of dollars.
The act would also reduce federal expenditures for certain programs over the coming decade, including nearly $300 billion from food aid for people with low income, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The legislation would include $92 billion in estimated spending reductions through proposed changes to work requirements for people participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and $128 billion in reduced federal spending by shifting more program costs to states, according to the CBO.
SNAP provides monthly financial assistance to help eligible households with low incomes buy groceries. It’s operated at the federal level by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, though states administer benefits and determine eligibility.
In February 2025, the most recent month for which data is available from the USDA, 42 million people participated in SNAP, with an average of $188 in benefits per person.
To qualify for SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, households typically must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line. This comes out to about $2,800 a month, $33,600 per year, for a family of three, according to a 2024 analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.
Under the proposed legislation, adults up to age 64 seeking benefits would have to meet work requirements, an increase from the current limit of age 54. There are also significant changes for parents of young children.
Here we’ll answer several questions for journalists covering these federal spending reductions, including:
- How much does the federal government spend on SNAP?
- How do states contribute funding to SNAP — and how might that change?
- How many people might SNAP reductions affect?
- What are work requirements?
- How would the proposed legislation affect parents of young children?
- Who participates in SNAP?
- What does SNAP have to do with the farm bill?
- What does the research say about the societal effects of SNAP benefits?
How much does the federal government spend on SNAP?
Federal spending on SNAP is much less than other social safety net programs.
Federally, SNAP cost about $100 billion in 2024, including $94 billion in benefit payments, according to the USDA. By comparison, social security spending was $1.5 trillion during fiscal year 2024 and Medicare and Medicaid spending was also about $1.5 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Social security, Medicare and Medicaid made up nearly 44% of overall federal spending in 2024, while SNAP made up about 1.5%.
What about state contributions to SNAP funding?
Another major area of potential change within the proposed legislation has to do with shifting some of the cost of SNAP from the federal government to states.
Benefit allotments would continue to be fully funded by the federal government through fiscal year 2027, which will end Sept. 30, 2027. States would be responsible for 5% of benefit costs starting October 1, 2027.
States administer monthly SNAP benefits and determine individual and household eligibility. They’re also responsible for ensuring program integrity, according to the USDA, which includes working with the federal government to reduce fraud and scams.
Incentives to reduce payment errors in the proposed law could push state costs higher.
Payment errors may include underpayment, where a household receives fewer benefits than they’re entitled, and overpayments, when the household receives more than their entitled.
Payment errors do not suggest fraud, according to the USDA — they’re a measure of “how accurately states determine eligibility and benefit amounts.” In fiscal year 2023, the most recent year available, South Dakota had the lowest error rate, 3.3%, while Alaska had the highest error rate, 60.4%.
Under the proposed legislation, states with a payment error rate between 6% and 8% would pay 15% of allotment costs. States with an error rate of 8% to 10% would pay 20%; and states with an error rate equal to or greater than 10% would pay 25%. The legislation would also reduce how much the federal government is allowed to cover for states’ administrative costs of SNAP, from 50% to 25%.
How many people might the SNAP reductions affect?
A similar bill introduced in the House in 2023 would have raised the work requirement age to 64 and would have meant between 3 million and 3.5 million fewer people on SNAP on average per month, according to a CBO estimate.
The current proposed legislation could mean 5.4 million people losing some or all SNAP benefits per month, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan nonprofit Urban Institute.
The upper age was previously increased from 49 during negotiations over the debt ceiling in 2023. Work requirements for federal food benefits were introduced in 1996.
What are work requirements?
While the proposed bill would raise the age limit for work requirements, it wouldn’t affect the work requirements themselves or most of their exemptions.
With some exceptions, SNAP participants who can work have to work at least 80 hours per month to qualify for food benefits. Those subject to work requirements don’t necessarily have to work for pay — volunteer work, unpaid work or work in exchange for something other than money all count.
Participants also generally cannot refuse work if offered and cannot refuse to take part in employment training programs.
But there are several exemptions from the work requirement.
For example, pregnant women are exempt, as are those certified by a doctor as being physically or mentally unable to work. Veterans and people who are homeless would also retain their exempt status under the proposed law — so would young adults under age 24 who were in foster care when they turned 18.
People complying with work requirements for other programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also would stay exempt from SNAP work requirements.
About 16% of SNAP households had at least one person subject to work requirements during fiscal year 2022, before the work requirement age was raised to 54, according to a 2024 USDA report.
That figure was 12% in 2019, before benefits were expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a 2023 analysis from the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.
How would the proposed law affect parents of young children?
While most work requirement exemptions would remain in place, they’re also a major area of potential change in the proposed bill.
Under current law, anyone in a household who is responsible for a dependent child is exempt from the work requirement.
Under the proposed legislation, that would change to anyone in a household responsible for a dependent child age 6 or younger — meaning people eligible for SNAP with a child age 7 or older would have to meet the work requirement.
There is a grace period of sorts in the proposed law. People eligible for SNAP who are responsible for a child above age 7 are exempt from work requirements if they are married to — and live with — someone complying with work requirements. That provision would sunset on October 1, 2030.
What demographic groups participate in SNAP?
White people made up about 35% of SNAP participants in fiscal year 2022, according to the 2024 USDA report. An even 26% of participants were Black; about 15% were Hispanic; about 4% were Asian and fewer than 2% were Native American.
“While the overall social safety net in recent decades has shifted to provide either work-contingent assistance or assistance targeted to specific categories of people, SNAP is the only social benefits program available to all low-income Americans,” writes Northwestern University economist Dianne Whitmore Schanzenbach in a January 2023 paper in the journal Food Policy.
About one-third of all SNAP participating households — 7.3 million — had children, according to the USDA report. Nearly two-thirds of households with children — 4.6 million — were headed by a single adult, and 43% of those single-adult households had at least some earned income. Of the 1.1 million SNAP participating households headed by a married couple, 66% had income. Single-adult households received $492 in monthly SNAP benefits, while households headed by a married couple received $603 on average.
Heavily populated states account for higher shares of national SNAP participation. About 12% of all SNAP participating households were in California for fiscal year 2022, for example, with about 7.5% each in New York and Florida, and 7.2% in Texas.
States with smaller populations — Alaska, Arkansas Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming — each accounted for less than 1% of the national total.
What does SNAP have to do with the farm bill?
The farm bill is wide-ranging legislation that sets funding and directs priorities for a variety of federal food consumption and production programs in the U.S., including SNAP.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now under consideration in the Senate, includes changes to farm bill programs, such as SNAP, which are usually addressed in standalone farm bill legislation.
SNAP falls under the nutrition policy area of the farm bill, which is administered by the USDA. It affects more people than any other farm bill program.
Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years.
The first farm bill was passed in 1933, with 18 farm bills having been passed in all. The most recent farm bill passed as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. It was extended in December 2024 and remains in effect through the end of September 2025.
What does the research say about the societal effects of SNAP benefits?
While there isn’t a huge amount of recent peer-reviewed research on how SNAP participation affects various aspects of life, such as employment, overall health, childhood education and hunger, there are some studies worth knowing about. We explain the top-level findings from a few of them here.
Employment
Focusing on people who can work and do not have dependents, the authors of a February 2023 paper in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy use a sample of more than 90,000 Virginians who likely would receive SNAP benefits if there were no work requirements.
Virginia suspended SNAP work requirements from 2009 to 2013, during the Great Recession. The authors follow the data on people enrolled in SNAP at the end of this period to see if they stayed in the program after the work requirements were reinstated.
The sample represents just 9% of all people in the state receiving SNAP at the time — meaning most people in the program were not able to work or were otherwise not subject to work requirements. As is the case nationally, the work requirements affected a small subset of the overall SNAP population in Virginia.
A year and a half after the work requirements were reinstated, 37% of prior SNAP participants were no longer on the rolls. People who were homeless or had no income were most affected, the authors find.
During the period studied, people age 50 and above were not subject to work requirements. And when people reached age 50, they tended to participate in SNAP.
The authors find a “sharp positive increase in participation at age 50,” which they associate with an overall decrease in participation due to the work requirements at the time for people under age 50.
The authors also determine that lower participation rates for people under age 50 compared with those older than 50 is linked to people failing to meet work requirements, not because of excessive paperwork needed to recertify for the program.
Crucially, the authors find work requirements do not lead to more labor force “attachment,” a word economists use to describe whether someone has the resources, professional connections and skills to find a job relatively easily.
In other words, work requirements do not appear to make it more or less likely someone will be employed after they are off SNAP, according to the findings. The authors suggest that work requirements may not address “underlying barriers to work,” though they note their results may not apply to other states.
Starting in 2010, as part of economic recovery efforts following the Great Recession, states were allowed to apply for waivers from federal SNAP work requirements if their economies were not doing well — for example, if the state unemployment rate was over 10% for a year.
Fourteen states kept work requirements in place, even though they qualified for waivers, according to a September 2020 paper published in Economic Inquiry.
From 2011 to 2017, economic conditions improved in some counties with waived work requirements, meaning SNAP participants in those areas had to again comply with the work requirements to receive benefits.
The author of the Economic Inquiry paper uses these geographic and time variations to study employment differences between people who get SNAP — with and without work requirements.
Among SNAP participants who were able to work, did not have dependents and were subject to work requirements, employment rates were 1.3 percentage points higher than those who got SNAP without the work requirement.
Likewise, SNAP participation fell 1.7 percentage points with the work requirement — workers without a high school diploma were the most likely to lose benefits.
In sum, more people were employed and fewer were on the SNAP rolls with the work requirement than without. The author notes that the yearly dollar value of SNAP is small compared with other social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, and that people will have stronger incentives to find work larger the value of a lost benefit.
“Arguably, [able-bodied adults without dependents] should be the most responsive to work requirements as they do not have dependents at home, have no disabilities, and are of working age,” the author writes. “Policies that seek to expand work requirements to other households — such as those with dependents — likely will have smaller employment effects than those found in this study.”
Health
The authors of a February 2024 paper in the Maternal and Child Health Journal perform a scoping review of 46 academic papers published from January 2008 to February 2023. The papers explore how SNAP benefits affect parts of recipients’ lives outside of nutrition, including use of health care services, family budgeting, child development, mental health among parents and children, and child abuse or neglect.
Most of the studies the authors examined suggest a positive relationship between SNAP benefits and healthcare usage — those who participate in SNAP are more likely to receive necessary medical care. Increases in SNAP benefits were also correlated with more check-ups for young kids.
Parents participating in SNAP and their kids also generally had better mental health, while many papers also find lower risks of child abuse among SNAP participants.
Past research has also found that SNAP beneficiaries report better health and fewer visits to the doctor when they are able to use the program.
Childhood education
Results from the February 2024 scoping review were mixed on child development measures, though some studies associated SNAP participation with better math skills for households in “deep poverty.”
In another study, published in July 2018 in the Economics of Education Review, elementary and middle school students in South Carolina scored slightly lower on math tests when it had been more than 26 days since their families received SNAP benefits.
“Given that we believe that learning is a cumulative process, when we consider the number of days each month that are late in the benefit cycle and the number of months where there is a weekend receipt, then the effects could be much larger as each recipient student is subjected to several such occurrences each year,” the authors write.
Nutrition and hunger
The authors of an August 2020 paper in Health Affairs examine what happened to nutrition in low-income households when two federal programs, SNAP and the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, overlapped in one U.S. city, Pittsburgh.
HFFI in part focuses on funding new, large, full-service supermarkets in food deserts. In cities, food deserts are usually defined as areas where about one third of the population lives more than one mile from a supermarket.
The authors note past research that finds smaller food stores that accept SNAP tend to stock fewer nutritious, healthy offerings than larger grocers.
They surveyed a sample of 195 SNAP participants in Pittsburgh’s Hill District before and after the HFFI-funded supermarket opened there in October 2013. The Hill District had been a food desert for decades prior to the opening of the new supermarket.
For comparison, the authors also surveyed 85 SNAP participants in another Pittsburgh food desert neighborhood with similar demographics — roughly 95% Black and 80% female — that did not get a new supermarket during the study period.
Survey participants in the neighborhood where the new supermarket opened reported feeling more secure in their ability to get enough food, while this measure was unchanged in the comparison neighborhood. They also reduced their sugar intake, compared with the comparison neighborhood, by nearly 3.5 teaspoons per day.
“This is the first study to indicate that the introduction of a full-service supermarket into a food desert can improve both food security and diet among SNAP participants,” the authors write. “The results indicate that such placement may be an effective policy to heighten the impact of a long-standing federal food and nutrition program — in this instance, SNAP — in communities with limited access to healthy food choices.”
For children, food programs such as SNAP generally improve nutrition and reduce the likelihood of hunger, past research has found.
Another paper finds that at the end of the month SNAP beneficiaries spend less time grocery shopping and making food at home than earlier in the month. When SNAP payments are disbursed later in the month — further from the time when other expenses such as rent are typically due — food spending is more consistent, other research finds.
“[SNAP] alleviates food hardship, and in some cases improves nutrition quality,” writes the author of the January 2023 paper in Food Policy. “While negative work incentive effects are inescapable, the impacts on employment and hours worked are modest. That may be partly because program participation improves a range of health outcomes in both adults and children.”
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