Pay raises have not kept pace with housing and childcare costs
Nearly half of enlisted families struggled to afford enough food in 2025. Military Families Advisory Network research found that nearly half of all active-duty military families experienced food insecurity, more than double the 2023 rate, with almost 57% of enlisted personnel and 14% of officers reporting it. ASYMCA food distribution programs serving more than 50 military installations saw demand rise 23% in 2025. On the morning a reporter visited the Harker Heights pantry, a few dozen active-duty and retired military family members waited in a single-file line extending past milk crates filled with fresh produce.
The Harker Heights ASYMCA also has a swimming pool, gym and coffee shop. Its free pantry occupies a small room at the far end of a second-floor hallway, where active-duty soldiers stationed near Fort Hood can receive groceries. More than a dozen pantries surround the Army base, where about 40,000 soldiers are stationed. A Blue Star Families study found that one in five active-duty families ate “less than they felt they should because there wasn’t enough money for food in the past year.” Lower-ranking troops with families were the hardest-hit group.
Miguel Pérez, a 39-year-old Army combat engineer, was on leave when a reporter found him carrying groceries in the Harker Heights parking lot. He asked that his real name not be used. His reusable bag held sweet potatoes, elbow macaroni, a 5-pound bag of frozen chicken breasts, large beets, a dozen eggs and other staples, which he estimated at about $100. Born in the Dominican Republic, Pérez lived in Colorado and worked in casinos before losing his job during the Covid-19 pandemic. An Army recruiter suggested military service; Pérez enlisted at 34, completed basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and eventually reached Fort Hood.
Combat engineers emplace and destroy obstacles for infantry and tank units, work involving explosives, dangerous conditions and grueling physical labor. Pérez said he was happy in the Army. “I always wanted to do this,” he said.
Military pay includes base pay, housing and food allowances, and dozens of supplements for hazardous duty, combat, demolition, diving and aviation. Rank and time in service also affect pay. Pérez, a sergeant who joined five years ago, said he brought home about $4,800 a month, including about $1,600 for housing and $476 for food, or just under $58,000 a year. “In the military we don’t make that much to cover gas, housing, kids’ back-to-school costs, utilities,” he said. “It’s hard today for us.”
Pérez usually visits the Harker Heights pantry twice a month, saving about $200 on groceries. “When you come early, you see a lot of military people,” he said. “We need it.” Pérez, who supervises several younger soldiers, said shame also deters service members from seeking assistance. “They look at it like if you’re taking something for free to eat, it’s a bad thing,” he said. “I guess they’re embarrassed about it.”
Pérez said some soldiers must choose where to direct limited funds. One soldier who received a speeding ticket told him: “I can’t pay it, because if I pay it, I’m not gonna buy groceries.” A recent divorce left Pérez as sole provider for sons ages 16 and three. His $1,900 monthly rent exceeds his $1,600 housing allowance, requiring him to cover the difference with base pay. His circumstances were typical of troops living off base whose housing costs exceed their allowances.
At the Killeen ASYMCA, which serves the Fort Hood area, demand has increased during the three years since the pantry opened. Executive director Sheri Yerrington said annual growth has ranged from 12% to 19%. The organization delivered 500,000 pounds of food to more than 19,000 families in 2025, and about 80% of its customers are active-duty personnel and their families. Its Thursday pantry often runs out of food by early afternoon. “It’s the most heartbreaking thing for a soldier in uniform to walk in here at one o’clock and our pantry is already empty, and I have to turn them away,” Yerrington said. “That is the worst feeling, and I have had it.”
Rebecca Maurer, 21, waited near the end of the line with her 18-month-old daughter, Chloe, on her hip. The Army supply specialist is married to another soldier and is pregnant with a second child. Despite two military incomes and what she described as a “frugal” approach to spending, Maurer said expenses were barely manageable. “It’s manageable,” she said, “but barely.”
It was Maurer’s first pantry visit. She had avoided free groceries because she and her husband had jobs and she worried about taking food from someone with greater need. “I didn’t go for a really long time because I thought I could be taking from someone that needs it more than me, because I have a job and my husband has a job,” she said. “It didn’t feel good.” Inflation and rising childcare costs prompted her to reconsider. Her husband, who grew up in a low-income household and sends part of each paycheck to relatives, reassured her that accepting assistance would not deprive another person.
Maurer pays nearly $800 each month for daycare and expects the expense to reach $1,400 when she returns to work after the second child is born. She also spends about $140 monthly on diapers and wipes. “Diapers, oh my God,” she said. Yerrington said, “The more childcare goes up, the more the family has to pay, the less money there is to put food on the table,” and, “And then as food costs rise, it’s this vicious circle for that active duty family.”
The Killeen ASYMCA offers low-cost before- and after-school care at 30 area schools and free short-term childcare during medical appointments at on-base clinics. Yerrington said, “The biggest challenge most of the time is children, the cost of childcare, and that’s many times why the mom doesn’t work.” Civilian jobs can also be scarce near bases, while transfers across the country or an ocean force military spouses to begin new job searches. Shannon Razsadin, co-founder and CEO of the Military Families Advisory Network, said those transitions are especially difficult for family finances.
Deployments may be planned years in advance or occur with little notice. Dorene Ocamb, the ASYMCA’s chief development officer, said food-assistance demand often rises with deployments at the organization’s pantries. “Often, a military spouse may have a job and then can’t work once their service member deploys because they have to take over 100% of childcare,” Ocamb said. The Department of Labor found that more than 20% of military spouses were unemployed and actively seeking work, while 67% cited a lack of childcare as a hindrance to employment or education. The combined obstacles left military-spouse unemployment at five times the civilian rate.
Razsadin said, “When you think about American households today, there are very few that can be sustained on a single income,” and described groceries as a “core financial stressor.” Food insecurity among active-duty troops has persisted for decades, and military pay has been insufficient for many enlisted families. President Richard Nixon appointed the Gates Commission in 1969 to examine ending the draft and moving to an all-volunteer force. The commission identified the “inequity” between military and civilian pay as a likely barrier to recruitment. For several years in the 1970s, junior military pay increases outpaced wage growth in comparable civilian jobs, but structural problems emerged as all-volunteer enlistees formed families.
By the late 1990s, Republican veteran Sen. John McCain was criticizing the tens of thousands of service members receiving food stamps, calling that situation a “national disgrace.” In 2000, he proposed a bill that would provide eligible service members’ food-stamp benefits as a monthly nutritional allowance in their military paychecks. “We must end the days of a ‘food-stamp Army’ once and for all,” he said.
McCain’s bill failed, but it inspired the 2001 National Defense Authorization Act to include the basic allowance for subsistence in every military paycheck as a standard allowance. It also led to the Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance, which was designed to raise qualifying military families’ income to 130% of the federal poverty level. The threshold was $18,100 for a family of four in 2002 and $33,000 by 2026.
Restrictive eligibility rules and a complicated application process produced few applications and rejected almost everyone who sought help under the Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance. In 2013, 620,000 military households sought some form of food assistance and nearly $104 million in food stamps were used at military commissaries, according to Task & Purpose. The program denied 97% of applicants that year, and Congress discontinued it in 2016.
The Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance’s participation and rejection figures showed how military assistance can miss families with the greatest need. The Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, also counts the basic allowance for housing toward household income. Because the allowance is tied to local rental rates, counting it as income can push military families over SNAP eligibility limits, particularly in high-cost markets such as California, Hawaii and Alaska.
Liza Lieberman, vice president of communications for the nonprofit Mazon, described the housing allowance’s inclusion as an administrative barrier that locks troops out of SNAP. “They never see that money,” she said. Lieberman, an advocate for an improved military food-assistance program, said Congress spent five years without replacing the discontinued allowance. “There were Republicans and Democrats on the hill that were laughing us out of the room,” she said. “No one wanted to acknowledge or confront the fact that we were not paying our troops enough.”
Congress authorized the Basic Needs Allowance in 2021 for service members with dependents whose annual income was below 200% of the federal poverty level. Lieberman described its approval process as confusing and time-consuming. Service members must apply through their chain of command, which she said can be intimidating and embarrassing, particularly for troops worried that appearing financially irresponsible could affect promotion. The military does not publish enrollment figures, and only 77 families received the supplement in 2023, its first reported year.
In most years, Congress approved military pay increases of 1% to 4% to track living costs. In 2025, the Senate approved an exceptional 14.5% increase for junior enlisted ranks and 4.5% for all other troops. According to USAFacts, an organization that analyzes government data, consecutive increases raised the average base salary of an enlistee with less than two years of service from about $22,000 in 2022 to nearly $28,000 in 2025. Inflation and rising living costs neutralized a large portion of those gains. Lieberman said, “There’s a misconception that they got a pay raise, so the issue is resolved,” but “the cost of groceries and gas have also increased.”
Childcare costs have risen more than 36% since 2019, residential rents are up about 40% and vehicle insurance has increased 48%, according to figures in the reporting. Energy costs rose 16% in the previous year, while gasoline prices increased about 40% since the war in Iran began in February. Housing allowances are tied to local rental markets, but rents have risen nationwide, requiring military personnel with families to use base pay for shortfalls. An Army Directorate of Prevention, Resilience and Readiness report found that only 37% of soldiers could find housing within their allowance limits in 2025, down from 58% in 2020.
Razsadin said, “The reality is that the military compensation structure is not designed to sustain a full household.” She said it was designed to support 18-year-old single enlistees living in barracks and eating in dining facilities, while many recruits now arrive with spouses, young children and sometimes extended family members who depend on them. The foundations of the structure date to the Career Compensation Act of 1949, when about 30% of enlisted Army soldiers were married. Marriage rates rose as the all-volunteer force created a path to long service, reaching nearly 60% in the 1990s. In 2024, about 44% of enlisted troops across all branches were married, roughly the same share as the civilian population, and about one-third had children.
Razsadin said, “We need to provide a wage that can sustain a number of dependents in a way that they can live with dignity.” She added: “No one joins the military to get rich, but they ought to be able to put food on the table and have a cushion in case of emergency.”
Family strain also bears on retention. An old Marine Corps joke about military marriage asks: “If the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.” The Marine Corps and other branches lose thousands of service members each year who might otherwise remain, and failures to retain quality troops degrade force strength. In 2021, four-star Gen. David Berger, the Marine Corps commandant, announced a retention strategy centered on easing the burden on families. “We have to treat people like human beings instead of inventory,” Berger said. He also said, “We have to pull out all the stops to try to find ways where we can keep them,” because Marines unable to care for their families are less likely to re-enlist.
The Army surveyed 38,000 soldiers that year about why they left or remained in service. More than 40% ranked the “impact of military service on my family’s wellbeing” among their top five reasons for declining to re-enlist. Financial stress also affects readiness, meaning how prepared a military is to fight a war. A 2025 Army Network Enterprise Technology Command report warned: “The distraction of financial stress can lead to decreased operational efficiency and mission readiness, as service members preoccupied with financial worries are less likely to perform at their best in high-stakes environments.”
Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, whose El Paso, Texas, district includes Fort Bliss, said the issue was not discussed enough nationally or in Congress. “Even with the salary increases that we’d programmed into the pay for junior enlisted members of the military, we’re still not keeping up with the rise of inflation and increasing costs,” she said. “We need to do a better job of adjusting to the changes in the economy.” Escobar, a former House Armed Services Committee member who serves on the Appropriations Committee, called the pay structure “archaic” and in need of modernization. She also called for military programs expanding affordable childcare and helping spouses find employment.
Escobar said raising pay and housing allowances offered the quickest response to financial insecurity. She identified the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act as legislation authorizing the 14.5% junior-enlisted increase. “But that is just a Band-Aid on the overall challenge,” she said, “because as we try to balance things out on the military side, then here comes a punch in the face from the economy and inflation.” She also said, “Absolutely it has a direct impact on our national security,” adding: “We want service members focused on the mission, on global threats, on their training, and on cohesion, and we want families to feel supported and taken care of so there’s an incentive for the service member to stay.”
Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee and helped secure the recent junior-enlisted pay increase, criticized the administration’s handling of housing allowances. “There’s one area where the Hegseth team has hurt us,” he said. “Our office worked for three years to fix the housing allowance, which underpays service members living off base in high-cost areas,” he said. “Congress appropriated $2.9bn to address this, but the Pentagon took that money and distributed it evenly to everyone as a bonus, which meant those living off base received less than we recommended.”
The payment became known as the “warrior dividend,” a one-time $1,776 bonus paid in December 2025 to everyone except the most senior officers. The Trump administration had said the bonus would be financed by tariffs, but the payment was financed entirely with congressional housing-allowance funds. Five years after Berger’s retention effort and the Army survey, and more than a year after the major junior-enlisted pay increase took effect, financial insecurity remained pervasive. When missed military paychecks became a threat during the October 2025 government shutdown, the Military Families Advisory Network launched an emergency food program and received more than 50,000 applications within 72 hours. Razsadin said, “So many military families are living in a bubble of just getting by, and then something happens and it throws everything off kilter for them.”
Maurer decided to leave the Army when her contract expires in September and planned to use her VA benefits to study psychology or behavioral analysis online. “I’ve already started applying to some colleges,” she said. “I’ll have so much free time when the baby is born.” Her current schedule requires work from 6:30 a.m. until after 5 p.m. With another baby and only one military income, she may later return to the Thursday line at the second-floor Harker Heights pantry.
The reporting was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network and supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.