Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal food assistance program formerly known as food stamps and commonly called SNAP, has fallen by more than 4.5 million people since July 2025, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of participation data published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is a decline of roughly 11 percent nationally between the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025 and April 2026, the most recent month for which complete national data was available at the time of the analysis. It is the steepest drop in SNAP participation in roughly three decades, comparable only to the period following the 1996 welfare law that cut the program. The decline is not the result of an improving economy or falling need. It is the direct, measurable result of eligibility rules Congress wrote into the 2025 reconciliation law, and a second set of changes has not taken effect yet: beginning October 1, 2027, states will be required to pay a share of SNAP benefit costs for the first time in the program’s history.
What SNAP Is and How It Worked Before
SNAP is the largest federal food assistance program in the United States. It provides monthly benefits, loaded onto a debit-style card, that recipients can use to buy groceries. Eligibility is based primarily on household income and assets. Historically, the federal government paid one hundred percent of the cost of the benefits themselves, while states and the federal government split the administrative cost of running the program roughly fifty-fifty. That structure meant a state could not reduce its own budget exposure by cutting benefits, because the benefits were not coming out of the state budget. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 79 percent of households receiving SNAP include a child, a person aged 60 or older, or a person with a disability.
What the 2025 Law Changed
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget reconciliation package signed into law on July 4, 2025, made what the Congressional Budget Office scored as the largest cut to SNAP in the program’s history: roughly $187 billion through 2034. The central mechanism was an expansion of what are called work-reporting requirements. Under prior law, adults aged 18 through 54 who had no dependents were required to document at least 80 hours per month of work, job training, or volunteering in order to keep receiving benefits beyond a three-month limit. The 2025 law raised that age ceiling from 54 to 64, newly subjecting adults in their late fifties and early sixties to the requirement. It also narrowed the exemption for parents and caregivers: previously, a parent with a child under 18 in the household was exempt, and the law lowered that threshold to children under 14. States began phasing in these changes between November 2025 and June 2026, with the exact timing depending on the state and on when individual cases came up for recertification.
The Exemptions That Were Removed
Beyond raising the age ceiling, the law eliminated three categorical exemptions that had previously shielded specific groups from the work-reporting requirement entirely. Veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults aging out of the foster care system had all been exempt under prior law. Those blanket exemptions were removed. A veteran aged 55 to 64 must now either document 80 hours of qualifying activity per month or establish that they qualify under some other exemption, such as a documented disability or caregiving responsibility. The same is true for a person experiencing homelessness in that age range. The practical difficulty is that the burden falls on the individual to produce documentation, and the people most likely to lose benefits under a documentation requirement are frequently the people least equipped to navigate one. The law did create new exemptions for individuals defined as Indian, Urban Indian, or California Indian under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.
What the Losses Look Like
The declines are not evenly distributed. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis, 44 states have seen SNAP participation fall by 5 percent or more, and 23 states have seen declines of 10 percent or more. Arizona has seen the steepest decline in the country, with participation falling by roughly 48 percent between July 2025 and June 2026, using the most recent state-level data available. In the 22 states that publish participation data broken out by age or that shared unpublished figures with researchers, the number of children receiving SNAP fell by approximately 1.1 million since July 2025. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has also noted that the pace of participation loss has exceeded what the Congressional Budget Office projected when it scored the legislation, meaning more people are losing benefits, and losing them faster, than the official estimates anticipated. Separate estimates indicate that roughly 1.4 million adults aged 55 through 64 without children in their households are newly at risk under the expanded age requirement.
The Bill States Get in 2027
The second major change in the law has not taken effect yet. Beginning October 1, 2027, most states will be required to pay between 5 and 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs, the first time in the program’s history that states have been asked to fund benefits rather than only administration. Analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities using Department of Agriculture data estimates the collective first-year bill to states at roughly $9 billion, with one estimate placing the eventual annual figure at $15 billion once the provisions are fully phased in. Separately, the state share of administrative costs rises from 50 percent to 75 percent, a shift the Food Research and Action Center estimates at roughly $17 billion over five years. The percentage each state owes is tied to its payment error rate for fiscal year 2025 or fiscal year 2026, meaning states with higher administrative error rates pay a larger share. That creates a structural incentive that did not previously exist: because states will now bear part of the cost of benefits, a state can reduce its own budget exposure by reducing the number of people enrolled. A draft farm bill circulating in the Senate would modify the state cost-sharing provisions, so the 2027 structure is not necessarily final.
Where Things Stand
The eligibility changes are already fully in effect across all states as of mid-2026, and the participation data now reflects roughly a year of implementation. The state cost-sharing provisions arrive on October 1, 2027, which falls after the November 3, 2026 midterm elections and during the following Congress. Advocacy organizations including the Food Research and Action Center have urged Congress to reverse or delay the cost shift before it takes effect, and the Senate Agriculture Committee has circulated draft farm bill language that would alter it. Whether that happens depends substantially on which party controls each chamber after November. In the meantime, the 4.5 million figure continues to move: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities updates its tracker as the Department of Agriculture publishes new monthly participation data, and the full effect of the changes will not be measurable until the phase-in has run for a complete year in every state.