Angelica Garcia thought she knew how to renew her SNAP benefits. The Tucson mother of three filled out the paperwork this spring, then called Arizona’s Department of Economic Security to finish the process. The phone system kept dropping her calls. She went to a state office and waited hours for a caseworker.
Arizona finally approved Garcia in June. By then, her family had gone two months without benefits and was relying on food pantries, beans, rice and tortillas.
“There’s hoops to jump through,” Garcia told Reuters.
Garcia hadn’t stopped qualifying.
Millions of other Americans have been removed from SNAP rolls during the same period, although the federal government still can’t say how many lost eligibility under new rules and how many were cut off for other reasons. Preliminary federal figures reported by the Associated Press show 36.6 million people received SNAP in May 2026, down from 42.2 million a year earlier. That is a decline of about 5.6 million people, or more than 13 percent.
The drop accelerated after President Donald Trump signed the 2025 reconciliation law, which tightened eligibility, expanded work requirements and changed how states pay for and administer the program. The Associated Press reported in August that federal officials still don’t know how much of the decline came from people who became legally ineligible, people whose incomes improved, people who stopped applying or people who still qualified but lost benefits during the application and renewal process.
Arizona shows why that distinction matters.
Arizona Removed More Than Half of Its SNAP Caseload
Arizona’s SNAP rolls fell by more than 400,000 people between April 2025 and April 2026, a 55 percent decline. Brett Bezio, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, told the Associated Press that new federal requirements brought more calls and more verification work, creating barriers for people trying to apply or stay enrolled.
Arizona responded by hiring caseworkers, allowing applicants to upload documents online and working through its backlog. SNAP participation rose by more than 16,000 people the following month. No federal eligibility rule changed between those two months. The state simply became better able to process cases.
Massachusetts has faced a similar problem. The state lost nearly 182,000 SNAP participants by mid-August while calls to its Department of Transitional Assistance rose 9 percent. Nearly half of callers never reached anyone, even after Massachusetts added 118 caseworkers.
Tia Fields, a safety-net policy analyst at Invest in Louisiana, told the Associated Press that paperwork has been ending cases she sees more often than the new work rules themselves. “A lot of it is administrative paperwork,” Fields said.
LaDiamond Lopez ran into that problem in Arizona. The state cut off her benefits in January and asked for more documentation about her income and household. Lopez told the Associated Press she began skipping meals and letting bills go past their due dates so her children could eat.
Trump Expanded the Rules That Can Remove Someone From SNAP
Congress also made more people legally subject to SNAP’s work requirements. The 2025 law extended the age range for adults covered by the time limit and reduced exemptions for some parents. A parent whose youngest child is 15 can now face requirements that previously did not apply. Congress also removed exemptions for homeless people, veterans and some former foster youth and narrowed eligibility for certain legally present immigrants, according to the Congressional Research Service’s analysis of the law.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had pushed states to enforce the work rules months before Trump signed the law. In April 2025, Rollins accused states of abusing waivers and said USDA was beginning a “new era for SNAP” centered on work, education and volunteering instead of what she called “idleness.”
USDA’s own data show that many SNAP households already include people who work or people who aren’t expected to. Twenty-eight percent of SNAP households reported earnings in fiscal 2023, averaging $1,548 a month. Nearly four out of five households included a child, an adult over 60 or a person with a disability. Those households contained 88 percent of everyone receiving benefits.
Lexin Cai, Hyewon Kim and Pauline Leung tested what happened when work requirements were applied to SNAP recipients in five states. Their July 2026 Census Bureau working paper found that the requirements reduced SNAP participation by 7 percent while producing no increase in employment. The researchers wrote that the rules “disproportionately screen out lower-income recipients.” The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.
States Now Have Another Reason to Screen Cases More Aggressively
The federal overhaul also changes what states can lose when their SNAP systems make too many payment errors. USDA reported a national SNAP payment error rate of 10.93 percent for fiscal 2024. The agency explicitly says the figure is not a measure of fraud. It includes both overpayments and underpayments.
Arizona’s rate was 8.84 percent. That was better than the national average, but still above the 6 percent threshold that can eventually require states to pay part of their own SNAP benefit costs. States will also have to cover 75 percent of administrative costs beginning in fiscal 2027, up from 50 percent.
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Reuters that Arizona tightened its verification procedures partly because the state was trying to lower its error rate. Liliana Soto, press secretary for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, told Reuters that failing to comply could expose the state to hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties.
Those incentives leave caseworkers trying to meet stricter federal standards while people like Garcia and Lopez are trying to keep their cases open.
A Lost SNAP Benefit Becomes Another Household Expense
USDA data on SNAP households put the average benefit at $332 per household each month in fiscal 2023. Households with children received an average of $574. Nearly three-quarters of participating households had gross incomes at or below the federal poverty line.
Families don’t stop buying groceries when that money disappears.
Researchers have already seen what happens when SNAP moves in the other direction. A study published in Food Policyexamined households after benefits increased under the 2009 stimulus. Families spent more on groceries, but they also increased spending on housing, transportation and education. The additional food assistance had freed cash that households had previously been using to buy food.
Researchers have not yet followed the same households through the current cuts, so the reverse effect can’t simply be assumed. But other SNAP research shows what happens when families run short. USDA researchers have found that many recipients spend heavily soon after their monthly benefits arrive and cut back later in the month. Research published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy found some households paying about 20 percent less per item by the fourth week, with the largest declines among families under the most financial pressure. The food they bought also tended to be lower quality.
Those tradeoffs are happening while grocery prices continue to rise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that food-at-home prices were 2.7 percent higher in July than a year earlier. Fruit and vegetable prices were up 5.1 percent.
Children Are Losing Benefits Along With Adults
Children made up about 39 percent of SNAP recipients in fiscal 2023. The new work rules apply to adults, but SNAP cases often cover entire households. When an adult loses the case, children can lose benefits too. Massachusetts reported that roughly 65,000 of the people who disappeared from its SNAP rolls were children.
Losing SNAP can eventually affect other benefits as well. School districts use SNAP enrollment to automatically certify children for free meals. Federal rules protect that school-meal determination for the rest of the school year, so a child whose household loses SNAP in October doesn’t immediately lose lunch in November. The problem can surface when the district certifies students again the following year.
SNAP eligibility can also establish income eligibility for WIC for pregnant women, new mothers and young children.
Food Pantries Are Taking In Families SNAP Used to Reach
Arizona food pantries served about 843,000 people in April, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network. That was 8 percent more than a year earlier and more people than Arizona had enrolled in SNAP at the time.
Carolyn Vega, a policy analyst at Share Our Strength, told the Associated Press that food banks and schools can’t replace a program the size of SNAP. Texas has lost close to half a million SNAP participants. Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Louisiana and several other states have also reported large declines.
Some families never make it as far as an application. Paco Velez, president and CEO of Feeding South Florida, told the Associated Press that some immigrants who are legally in the United States have stayed away from SNAP because they fear attracting government attention.
SNAP Cuts Reach Across Racial Lines
White households make up the largest share of households receiving SNAP. Of the roughly 15.6 million U.S. households that received SNAP in 2024, about 7.2 million, or 46 percent, were White-headed households. About 3.8 million, or 24 percent, were Black-headed households.
The numbers matter because SNAP cuts are sometimes discussed as though they affect a narrow segment of the country. They don’t. Millions of households across racial groups depend on the program, which means the financial pressure created by losing benefits can spread through household budgets across a much broader part of the country.
Families Cut Off Over Paperwork Can Apply Again
Federal rules still place deadlines on state agencies. When an agency asks for verification, it generally must give a household at least 10 days to provide it. States generally have 30 days from the application date to decide a case. Households that qualify for expedited service can be entitled to benefits within seven days.
A household whose case closes after missing paperwork can submit another application. Eligibility on that application begins from the new filing date. Arizona’s experience shows how much the administrative side matters: the state hired more workers, improved document uploads and reduced its backlog, and thousands of people returned to SNAP in May.
For Myriam Flores, the months before those improvements were much simpler to describe. Arizona cut about $1,100 a month from her household in January. Reuters found her in Phoenix this spring going to a food pantry nearly every day.
At night, Flores lay awake deciding which bills could wait until the next month.
Sources: Associated Press; Reuters; Congressional Research Service; U.S. Department of Agriculture; U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service; U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service; U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Arizona Department of Economic Security; Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance; Arizona Food Bank Network; Share Our Strength; Invest in Louisiana; Feeding South Florida; Food Policy; Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy; Electronic Code of Federal Regulations.
