About 1.2 million fewer children are receiving SNAP food benefits than in July 2025 — roughly a 13% decline across the 25 states with available data, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. CBPP estimates the nationwide figure is well over 1.5 million children.
Earlier analyses used smaller samples and produced smaller numbers. Newsweek reported in July that 1.06 million children had lost benefits across 19 states. The larger figure reflects more states reporting, not a sudden acceleration. The policy that produced it was designed to move adults into work. It has not.
Unemployment has been flat the entire time
CBPP’s SNAP tracker states it plainly, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data: unemployment nationwide has been flat at about 4% since July 2025. At best, it is down in 23 states and the District of Columbia by a single percentage point.
Expanded work requirements are justified on the theory that benefit time limits push recipients into employment. If that were happening at the scale of roughly five million people leaving the program, it would be visible in the labor data. This is not a new finding. A 2021 Urban Institute study cited by NPR found that limiting how long people can receive SNAP does not lead to more people getting jobs — it leads to more people losing food aid.
How a law aimed at adults took food from children
Children were not the target of the legislation. Understanding how they absorbed nearly half the losses requires one specific rule change. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, expanded work requirements for what the program calls able-bodied adults without dependents. It did two things at once:
- Raised the affected age bracket from 18–54 to 18–64
- Lowered the dependent-child exemption from under 18 to under 14
That second change is the mechanism. A parent of a 15-year-old was previously exempt. Now that parent must document 80 hours a month of paid work, unpaid work, volunteering or a government work program — or lose benefits after three months in any three-year period.
When the parent fails the requirement or the paperwork, the household loses benefits. The 15-year-old eats less. The child was never subject to a work requirement. Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, gave ProPublica the word for it: children are “collateral damage.”
The law also ended eligibility for certain immigrants. NPR reported that while almost all SNAP recipients are native-born or naturalized citizens, a small group — refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of domestic abuse or trafficking — lost federal food aid entirely.
The numbers, and the rate
Total SNAP participation fell from about 42 million people in early 2025 to just over 37 million by May 2026 — roughly five million people, a 12% drop, per CBPP’s analysis of USDA data. That is about one in eight Americans before the law took effect. In the 25 states CBPP tracks, children account for close to half of the nearly 2.8 million people who left the program.
Expressed as a rate, 1.2 million children over roughly 14 months works out to approximately 86,000 children per month — about 2,800 children a day, every day, for more than a year. State-level numbers are starker. Arizona’s SNAP participation fell 54% between July 2025 and May 2026, the steepest decline in the country.
ProPublica reported that 205,223 Arizona children are no longer receiving benefits, a 55% drop. Louisiana was second among children at 22%. Arizona adopted the changes immediately after passage. A spokesman for the state’s Department of Economic Security told the Wall Street Journal the expanded work requirements were primarily responsible.
The case for the policy
The argument for work requirements deserves to be stated by someone who makes it. Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute told NPR that with unemployment relatively low, three months is an appropriate window to find work. “The overarching goal of the policy is to ensure that there’s an expectation for work or a path towards work for those who are seeking government benefits.”
That is a coherent position. It holds that benefit programs should carry mutual obligation, and that a tight labor market is the right moment to enforce one. The complication is that the same tight labor market that makes the requirement reasonable also means the people leaving SNAP are not visibly arriving in jobs.
Why paperwork may matter more than work
There is a second explanation for the decline that has nothing to do with employment, and states have a financial incentive behind it. Under the 2025 law, states face penalties tied to payment error rates, and starting in 2027 most states will have to pay between 5% and 15% of SNAP benefit costs for the first time — totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Newsweek reported that this creates an incentive to tighten eligibility or delay approvals, and that states have made changes increasing denials and delays — reducing participation even among families who still qualify. Louise Hayes, an attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia who helps clients access SNAP, described the effect to NPR
“Many of our clients are very confused and alarmed by the new work requirements because they’ve had almost no time to prepare for the work requirement. And many don’t even know about it.” An eligible family that loses benefits to a documentation failure is not a policy success under anyone’s theory.
What happens next
The Congressional Budget Office projects that work requirement changes alone will reduce SNAP participation by 2.4 million people in an average month over 2025–2034. Actual losses have already exceeded CBO’s estimates, CBPP found in June. The cost-share requirement hits states in 2027.
