After several federal policy changes last summer tightened eligibility requirements for SNAP and placed more responsibility for running the program on states, the food assistance program has seen a sharp drop in the number of people enrolled.
In April — the latest month for which federal data is available — overall SNAP participation fell nearly 13% year over year, to just over 37 million people, according to the USDA. Every state except one posted an annual decline in the number of people enrolled that month, and half of the states saw participation dip by 10% or more, preliminary data from the USDA shows.
But that enrollment decline has been spread unevenly across the country, with some states seeing a significant impact while others have faced minimal disruption.
Arizona saw the biggest decrease, with its number of SNAP participants dropping by more than half. Several Southeastern states also recorded steep declines in SNAP participation, with Florida and Louisiana each recording year-over-year drops of over 20% and Georgia posting a nearly 28% drop.
California — the state with the highest number of SNAP participants — saw participation in the food assistance program drop 6.6% in April compared with a year ago. New Mexico, the state with the highest percentage of its population receiving SNAP benefits, saw participation dip almost 4%.
Year-over-year SNAP participation changes in April varied widely by state
Half of U.S. states saw SNAP participation slide 10% or more
Meanwhile, Alaska — the only state that did not record a decline — saw the number of people signed up for SNAP increase just over 8%. In Guam, a U.S. territory, SNAP participation increased by nearly 7%, to 39,546 people. Guam and the Virgin Islands are the only two U.S. territories whose residents can participate in SNAP.
The decline in program enrollment follows the enactment of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the law President Donald Trump signed last summer that established stricter work requirements for SNAP participants. Those new requirements are expected to reduce SNAP participation by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over roughly the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The new work requirements “create a significant paperwork burden, as affected individuals must submit monthly documentation to the state, which must then review and process that information,” Sara Bleich, professor of public health policy at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, said in a Q&A published last November by the Harvard Kennedy School, the university’s graduate school of public policy.
Under the law, states are also facing potentially higher costs for the program, as states with high SNAP payment error rates are now required to cover a percentage of the cost of benefits for their residents starting next October. States must separately shoulder a higher percentage of administrative costs starting in fiscal year 2027.
Arizona’s Department of Economic Security said in a June blog post that the new federal requirements forced the state to “rapidly overhaul our process to administer” SNAP with efforts that included increasing documentation requirements, adding continuous income monitoring to check SNAP caseload information against employer-reported data, adding a review process to address application errors and making technological investments.
The department noted that the state has made progress clearing backlogs and that “SNAP caseloads are finally stabilizing.” In May, 451,762 Arizonans received SNAP benefits — up 16,566 individuals since April, according to the state.
