SNAP enrollment drops 13% after Trump administration work requirements

States must cover 75% of SNAP administrative costs beginning in October

US Department of Agriculture data show enrollment in SNAP fell from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026. The 13% decline followed restrictions imposed by the Trump administration. Stakeholders said the changes pushed more people to seek help from food banks or go hungry.

A volunteer hands out milk during a free food distribution at Rancho Cienega Park on August 29, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Under the previous rules, only adults ages 18 to 54 without a dependent under 18 who were described as able-bodied had to meet a minimum 20-hour workweek or receive benefits for no more than three months out of three years. The new rules cover people ages 18 to 64 without a dependent under 14 and require paid or volunteer work for at least 20 hours a week.

The Congressional Budget Office projected that the Trump administration’s changes would reduce SNAP spending by about $187 billion over 10 years. Trump and other Republicans have said the work rules encourage people to find jobs. Elected officials, nonprofit leaders and people experiencing food insecurity have countered that the changes make it harder for families to feed themselves.

Starting in October, the One Big Beautiful Act requires states to cover 75% of SNAP administrative costs, up from half.

The enrollment decline varied by state. Arizona’s enrollment dropped 50% between July 2025 and June 2026, while Kentucky’s fell 6%. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who leads the predominantly Republican state, wrote to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins this month, saying he was concerned that more people in his state are going hungry because of the SNAP changes, including children and the elderly.

Trump and Rollins described the enrollment reduction as a positive. At a farming festival in Minnesota in August, Rollins said Democrats did not love the decrease and called it a win for people who want to work. “But for those of us that love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we move 5 million people off of food stamps,” she said.

Critics of the changes said grocery and gas prices had increased during Trump’s second term, making necessities harder to afford. Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP at the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, which supports anti-hunger programs, said, “If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the Snap program.”

The Food Bank Council of Michigan operates a helpline that helps residents with SNAP applications and local food programs. The organization began receiving more than three times as many calls each day after the SNAP changes took effect and temporarily suspended the helpline this week because of the volume.

Anti-hunger advocates said the employment data do not support the administration’s argument that more people found jobs or saw their wages increase and no longer needed food stamps. The United States added 776,000 non-farm jobs between January 2025 and September 2026, while the country added 2.6 million during the last 20 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, according to Factcheck.org. Sheril Kirshenbaum, the Food Bank Council of Michigan’s chief external relations officer, said, “We don’t have the data to suggest that there are more jobs suddenly out there. We just know fewer people are getting benefits.”

The enrollment changes have also affected Feed Louisville, a nonprofit that aims to reduce hunger and food waste. The group receives surplus food from restaurants and farmers, uses the ingredients to prepare meals for partner organizations and sends unused items to agencies. Rhona Kamar, Feed Louisville’s founder and executive director, said, “There is always going to be a percentage of our communities who we need to help – we have to accept that – and so, once we accept it, it is easy to just move forward and do the right thing, which is to provide resources to people who need them.” “We have always had enough food around,” Kamar said. “But now what we are seeing is every day the shelves are empty at the end of the day, so every bit of food that comes into our kitchen every day goes right back out to the community at the end of the day.”

Lower SNAP enrollment has also affected schools’ ability to provide free meals. Under the Community Eligibility Provision, a school can use federal funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to every student without household applications if at least 25% of its student body receives SNAP or another public benefit. The Washington Post reported this week that fewer students enrolled in SNAP made those meals harder to provide. Twenty-six schools in the Houston Independent School District that previously provided free meals to all students through the program were no longer eligible.

A USDA spokesperson downplayed the effect of the restrictions. “The number of individuals receiving benefits is constantly changing and is not representative of any one policy,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Guardian. The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the SNAP changes had forced some Americans to go hungry.

States must also prepare for an October 2027 change that will require them to pay some SNAP benefit costs when their payment error rate is above 6%. The USDA says the error rate is not a measure of fraud; states with rates above 13% received a delay in implementing the requirement. Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said states would have to pay more for existing work while finding money for additional error-reduction work. Kirshenbaum said that could produce longer processing times and waits for people seeking assistance. “States have been really set up to fail,” Llobrera said.

Sandra Scott, 58, has been homeless during most of her life. Until she began receiving SNAP benefits four years ago, Scott said she ate at “soup kitchens or wherever I could,” and that there was often nowhere to go on weekends. She has had six back surgeries and has struggled with mental illness. Scott became addicted to methamphetamines, got sober two years ago and now lives in a subsidized apartment.

Scott is working to obtain an emergency responder certificate and volunteers with The Table, a nonprofit restaurant that uses a pay-what-you-can model. Asked what she would say to members of the Trump administration about the SNAP changes, she said: “Why don’t you walk in one of our shoes, somebody in the community that doesn’t have anything, that wasn’t born into money or doesn’t have a job because it’s so hard to find or [who] can’t find affordable housing because it’s too high?”