How Much Does SNAP Cost the Government?

Published on October 28, 2025 | Prices Last Reviewed for Freshness: November 2025
Written by Alec Pow - Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA Alexander Popinker

Educational content; not financial advice. Prices are estimates; confirm current rates, fees, taxes, and terms with providers or official sources.

The federal government has been partially shut down since Oct. 1, 2025, after Congress and the White House failed to pass full-year funding for the new fiscal year, according to reporting from AP News and Reuters.

Roughly 900,000 federal workers have been furloughed, many others are working without pay, and states are being told to brace for a possible pause in SNAP (food stamp) payments. Governors are now saying, out loud, that if Washington stalls, they may have to buy groceries for millions of residents themselves.

Short version: SNAP is a $100 billion-a-year program that helps about 42 million people buy food. That sounds huge. It is not. Social Security and Medicare plus Medicaid each clear $1.5 trillion. The Pentagon clears north of $800 billion. SNAP is the program that gets called “unsustainable” at town halls, and it’s one of the smallest major lines in the federal budget, according to USAFacts and 2024–2025 budget summaries from the Congressional Budget Office as cited by The Journalist’s Resource.

TL;DR

• The federal government spent about $100.3 billion on SNAP in fiscal year 2024, which fed roughly 42 million people and equaled about 1.5 percent of total federal spending, according to USAFacts. Social Security and Medicare plus Medicaid each cleared about $1.5 trillion, and national defense ran in the neighborhood of $800 billion to $870 billion, according to The Journalist’s Resource citing the Congressional Budget Office and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. SNAP is loud in politics and comparatively small in dollars.
• That works out to roughly $760 per U.S. household per year, based on about 133 million households counted by the U.S. Census Bureau, and about $610 per federal tax return filed, based on roughly 163.5 million returns processed in 2024 by the IRS.
• The typical participant received about $187 per month in 2024, or roughly $6 a day to eat. A four-person household can get up to $994 a month. That works out to about $2.76 per person per meal versus an average meal cost of $3.41 in 2024, based on the Urban Institute.
• About 94 cents of every SNAP dollar is direct grocery money. Roughly 6 cents pays for caseworkers, eligibility checks, and fraud prevention, according to the Food Research & Action Center and the Government Accountability Office. USDA put improper payments at about 11.7 percent of SNAP benefits in 2023. Federal watchdogs say the governmentwide improper payment rate, across programs like Medicare and Medicaid, was closer to 3.7 percent in 2024, according to oversight summaries reported by Axios and the GAO.
• Right now, because of the ongoing federal shutdown, USDA has warned states it may not issue November SNAP on time and will not guarantee reimbursement if states cover the gap themselves, according to Reuters and AP News. That puts food benefits for more than 41 million people on the line in a single month.
• If SNAP payments pause in a large state like Texas, roughly $600 million in grocery spending a month vanishes, about $20 million a day pulled out of local stores, and local officials say food banks, school cafeterias, and ERs get the bill immediately, according to the Houston Chronicle and NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

Related: Social Security benefits to rise 2.8% in 2026 under cost-of-living increase — what the next COLA means for a ~$1.5T program.

SNAP is often described like a line item in a budget fight. In reality, it is how millions of households pay for dinner tonight.

Why this is in the news right now

The shutdown that began Oct. 1, 2025, has already furloughed hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slowed a wide range of services, according to AP News. Essential programs like Medicare keep operating, but USDA has warned states that it will not automatically front November SNAP benefits using emergency reserves and will not guarantee reimbursement if states pay out of pocket, reporting from Reuters shows. Translation: if Congress and the White House do not reopen the government, millions of households could see SNAP delayed or reduced in November.

Several governors are already drafting backup plans. California officials have said they are steering state money toward food banks and even leaning on the National Guard to help move supplies if benefits stall for the roughly 5 million people on CalFresh, the state’s SNAP version, according to the Guardian and SD Voice. Virginia has signaled it may try to issue November SNAP under state emergency authority. Texas has warned residents that if the shutdown keeps going, November benefits could be delayed, pulling an estimated $600 million in grocery money out of checkout lanes in just 30 days, according to the Houston Chronicle.

When SNAP stalls, families don’t stop eating. The cost just moves to food pantries, ERs, school lunch programs, and state welfare offices. The federal bill doesn’t disappear. It relocates.

Here is what SNAP actually is, how much it really costs, and what gets cut when it “gets cut.”

Program and funding basics

SNAP, short for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is the main federal nutrition program for low income households. It used to be called food stamps. Today it runs on EBT, an electronic benefit transfer card that works like a debit card at most grocery stores and many corner markets.

It is grocery money, not cash. The USDA Food and Nutrition Service says SNAP covers staple foods and nonalcoholic drinks. You cannot swipe it for alcohol, tobacco, vitamins, pet food, or hot prepared meals at checkout. The rules are strict on purpose so the dollars are tied to nutrition, not general spending.

Who pays. USDA funds all SNAP benefit dollars. States handle most of the front line work. State offices take applications, verify income and immigration status, investigate suspected fraud, and hear appeals. The federal government reimburses states for roughly half of those administrative costs. The Food Research & Action Center describes the setup this way: Washington buys the groceries, states run eligibility and oversight.

SNAP is also an entitlement. That means if you meet the rules, you get benefits. It does not close the door when the budget gets tight. Spending rises in a recession because more people qualify and food costs jump. Spending falls when wages rise and inflation settles, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.

SNAP is not a “pot of money.” It is a guarantee. The check grows or shrinks with real need on the ground.

Current annual price tag to government

SNAP cost about $100.3 billion in fiscal year 2024 and served an average of 41.7 million people per month. That is roughly 12 percent of the country using SNAP in a typical month, according to USAFacts and the Washington Post.

The USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that in 2024 the average participant got about $187.20 per month. That is roughly $6 a day to eat. The Washington Post estimated that a typical household benefit in 2023 was about $332 per month, or about $177 per person, which works out to under $6 a day per person. This is grocery triage, not comfort spending.

Do the rough math: $100.3 billion spread across 41.7 million people is around $2,400 per person per year, or about $200 a month. That simple division includes both food benefits and the cost of running the program. The official average benefit number is lower because not everyone gets the maximum amount and USDA’s figure counts only direct grocery money.

Most of the bill is direct food support. About $93.8 billion, or 93.5 percent of SNAP’s 2024 total, went straight onto EBT cards. The other ~6 percent funded caseworkers, computer systems, fraud prevention, nutrition education, and job training programs tied to SNAP. The Government Accountability Office and the Food Research & Action Center both describe SNAP’s overhead as lean relative to the size of the program.

SNAP also moves up and down with crisis. During the COVID emergency, Congress approved temporary boosts and looser rules. Total SNAP spending jumped to about $132.2 billion in fiscal 2021. By fiscal 2024, after those emergency boosts ended, cost had come back down to about $100.3 billion. That is still higher than pre-pandemic levels but clearly off the peak, according to USAFacts.

What this means for a taxpayer

Talking about tens of billions can feel abstract. Here is what that looks like in everyday terms.

Per household. The U.S. has roughly 133 million households, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. If you spread the SNAP budget, about $100.3 billion, evenly across every household, you get around $760 per year. That is not how taxes are actually assessed. It is a way to grasp the scale.

Per tax return. The IRS processed about 163.5 million individual returns in 2024. Divide the program’s $100.3 billion cost by that and you get roughly $610 per return for the year. Think of that as the annual national grocery tab to keep millions from skipping meals.

Per day. SNAP spending works out to roughly $275 million every day. That is about $6.60 per enrolled person per day. If you are picturing milk, eggs, rice, peanut butter, tortillas, apples, and frozen vegetables, you are close.

For about the cost of a fast-casual lunch per day, SNAP keeps someone’s fridge from going empty.

Where the money goes

SNAP calculates a household’s maximum monthly allotment, then adjusts it based on reported income. In the 48 contiguous states and D.C., the current maximum per month is about $298 for one person, $546 for two, $785 for three, $994 for four, and $1,183 for five. Each additional person adds roughly $218. This is what loads onto the EBT card, according to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.

Administrative work is the quiet cost. States interview applicants, confirm wages, run databases that catch duplicate enrollment, replace lost cards, audit suspicious purchases, and handle appeals. USDA helps pay for that work. The Government Accountability Office reported that USDA estimated about $10.5 billion in SNAP benefits in 2023 were “improper payments,” or about 11.7 percent of benefits. Improper does not always mean fraud. Sometimes it is a paperwork error or a missed update in someone’s wages.

To put that in context, federal watchdogs said improper payments across the government as a whole added up to about 3.7 percent of all federal payments in 2024, across programs including Medicare and Medicaid, and that total misspending was about $149 billion, according to oversight summaries reported by Axios and the GAO. In other words, SNAP’s 11.7 percent improper rate is higher than the governmentwide average, but a lot of what gets counted as “improper” in SNAP are clerical errors and late wage reporting, not organized fraud rings billing fake medical tests.

Those integrity checks are not cheap. Chasing bad payments means investing in staff, fraud analytics, and identity verification. That cost is part of the ~6 percent overhead.

To see how that plays out in real life, take a four-person household in Ohio at the maximum benefit, roughly $994 a month. Over 12 months, that is close to $12,000 in grocery money. Add about $800 in shared admin, fraud monitoring, card systems, and case management, and the public cost to keep that family fed for the year is roughly $12,800. That backend work, which most taxpayers never see, includes SNAP Employment and Training services that try to connect adults to steady work, according to the GAO and USDA.

SNAP for a typical household

The table below shows how the maximum SNAP benefit scales by family size and how that translates to dollars per meal. We compare that to an average U.S. meal cost of $3.41 in 2024. The Urban Institute found that meal cost was about 20 percent higher than what SNAP covers in 99 percent of U.S. counties.

For a single adult, SNAP gets close to the average meal price. For a family of four, there is about a 65¢ gap per meal, almost $8 a day that still has to come from wages, school meals, food pantries, church drives, or cutting portions.

Why SNAP spending goes up or down

SNAP spending jumps when the economy is weak and cools when the economy recovers.

During the Great Recession, millions lost work and signed up. Costs surged. In 2020 and 2021, the pandemic wiped out service jobs overnight. Congress approved emergency boosts and looser rules. Total SNAP spending climbed to about $132.2 billion in fiscal 2021, according to USAFacts.

Those temporary boosts ended. By fiscal 2024, SNAP cost about $100.3 billion. Still high compared with pre-pandemic years, but well below the emergency peak, per USAFacts.

Policy changes also move the price tag. When food prices spike, USDA updates the Thrifty Food Plan, the shopping basket used to set SNAP benefit levels. That makes benefits larger per household, which raises federal spending automatically, as explained by the USDA Economic Research Service.

Lawmakers can also tighten or relax work requirements. In 2025, federal policymakers backed by the Trump administration and key House Republicans expanded those work rules to cover more adults, including some in their late fifties and early sixties, and raised the bar to around 80 hours per month of work or job training for certain adults to keep benefits, according to Business Insider and the Washington Post.

Demographics keep pressure on the program even when unemployment falls. USDA data shows many SNAP households include seniors, disabled adults, and working families with kids. In Michigan, state officials at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services warned that 1.4 million residents, including older adults and families with children, could miss November benefits if the shutdown blocks federal funds.

SNAP next to other safety net programs

There is a familiar talking point that SNAP is driving the national debt. The math does not support it.

SNAP cost roughly $100 billion in 2024 and accounted for about 1.5 percent of all federal spending, per USAFacts. By comparison, Social Security was on the order of $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2024. Medicare plus Medicaid were also around $1.5 trillion, based on Congressional Budget Office tallies cited in May 2025 by The Journalist’s Resource.

Defense stands apart. The Department of Defense alone spent about $826 billion in 2024. Total national defense, which includes nuclear work in the Department of Energy and some related security programs, was roughly $873 billion, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Other safety net programs are smaller than SNAP but still critical. WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, cost about $7.3 billion in fiscal 2024 and serves more than 6 million mothers, infants, and young children, according to FactCheck.org. TANF, the main federal cash assistance block grant, sends states about $16.5 billion a year and states chip in around $15 billion, which puts combined TANF-related spending near $31.5 billion, according to the GAO.

The Housing Choice Voucher program, often called Section 8, had about $32.7 billion in funding authority in the HUD Budget in Brief for fiscal 2024. That money helps low income tenants pay rent in private apartments, according to the HUD Budget in Brief.

See the table below for a snapshot using 2024–2025 estimates from USDA, HUD, GAO, USAFacts, and the Peterson Foundation. We also include national defense for scale using compiled spending data.

Further reading: Who spent more at the White House: the Obama years lead — a long-view look at federal spending patterns across administrations.

SNAP is loud in politics. On the budget ledger, it is small next to Social Security, Medicare, or the Pentagon.

How policymakers try to control cost

Lawmakers talk about two main levers when they say they want to “cut SNAP spending.” They are: 1) policing errors and fraud, and 2) tightening work rules while shifting more of the bill to states.

1. Program integrity. States and USDA run data matches to spot duplicate enrollment, require photo ID in many places, and investigate suspicious EBT swipes. The Government Accountability Office reported in September 2024 that USDA estimated about $10.5 billion in SNAP benefits in 2023 were “improper payments,” about 11.7 percent of total benefits. That number includes fraud, but also paperwork mistakes and late income updates. Cleaning it up costs money but also protects credibility.

2. Work rules and cost shifting. In 2025, Congress and the Trump-aligned bloc in Washington backed tighter work requirements for more adults — including some older workers and some parents — generally requiring about 80 hours a month of work or approved training to continue receiving benefits, according to Business Insider and the Washington Post. For the broader cost picture and what states could be asked to shoulder, see our deep dive: How much will the One Big Beautiful Bill cost?

Those same packages, described in outlets like Axios as the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” also start shifting SNAP costs down to states. Under those proposals and newly passed budget language, states could be forced to shoulder a slice of SNAP benefit costs, from around 5 percent up to roughly 25 percent in states with high payment error rates, and cover as much as 75 percent of administrative costs going forward, instead of splitting them roughly 50/50. Governors and budget officers have warned in the Washington Post and analyses from groups such as the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that this either means raising state taxes or cutting food support during the next downturn.

Economic payoff and local impact

SNAP is not just an expense line. It behaves like emergency stimulus in low income neighborhoods because the money gets spent immediately and locally.

The Food Research & Action Center says each federal dollar spent on SNAP during weak labor markets produces about $1.50 to $1.80 in broader economic activity because families spend benefits right away at nearby grocers and markets, not online or overseas, based on analysis from the Food Research & Action Center.

Look at Texas. Officials said more than 3.4 million Texans depend on SNAP, with average benefits of about $379 per household per month. They warned that if the shutdown drags on and November payments stall, those households could instantly lose roughly $600 million in grocery money for that month. That is about $20 million per day not flowing through H-E-B, corner stores, meat counters, and produce stands, the Houston Chronicle and NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reported. Food banks in Texas said demand jumped immediately and they were already burning through millions in reserves to cover it, according to the Houston Chronicle.

California tells the same story at a different scale. CalFresh, the state’s SNAP version, delivered about $12 billion in federally funded grocery aid to roughly 5 million people across 2023 and 2024, and the state budget still plans roughly $14.9 billion to keep CalFresh and related nutrition help running, SD Voice reported. Louisiana received about $1.9 billion in SNAP in 2024, and local leaders fear that tighter work rules could pull that money out of one of the hungriest states in the country, Axios said.

Food banks feel this immediately. H-E-B, the San Antonio grocery chain, donated $6 million to food banks and Meals on Wheels in Texas to soften the blow if SNAP pauses, the San Antonio Express-News reported. That sounds big, and it matters, but it is tiny next to a monthly SNAP flow that can top $600 million, the kind of drop that NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth warns would hit store traffic within days.

When SNAP stalls, families don’t stop eating. The cost shifts to food banks, emergency rooms, school lunch programs, and state welfare offices, which means the bill doesn’t vanish, it just moves.

Answers to Common Questions

Is SNAP paid for by federal or state taxes?

SNAP grocery money is paid 100 percent by the federal government through USDA. States and the federal government split the cost of running the offices: caseworkers, eligibility checks, fraud monitoring, and appeals, as explained by the Food Research & Action Center. Under new cost-shift proposals described by Axios and analyzed by the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, states could soon be required to pick up more of both admin costs and even part of the benefits themselves, something that historically has been entirely federal.

How much SNAP fraud happens each year?

Fraud gets attention, but “improper payments” includes more than fraud. The Government Accountability Office said USDA estimated about $10.5 billion in SNAP benefits in 2023 were improper, or about 11.7 percent of all benefits. That total includes fraud, but also paperwork mistakes, outdated wage info, and agency error. Federal auditors said improper payments across all federal programs were about 3.7 percent of total payments in 2024, which shows SNAP’s error rate sits above the broad average but is tracked and chased in real time, according to Axios and the GAO.

Can undocumented immigrants get SNAP?

Federal law bars most undocumented immigrants from getting SNAP. Lawmakers have fought over new data-matching proposals that would collect immigration status from state SNAP offices. Critics warn this could scare off even lawful residents who are eligible, Reuters reported.

Can SNAP money be used for anything besides groceries?

No. SNAP can be used for most grocery items, including fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and pantry staples. In some states you can also use it for seeds or plants that grow food. It cannot be used for alcohol, cigarettes, vitamins, pet food, or hot prepared foods at checkout. Texas and several other states now have USDA waivers that will block candy and certain sugary drinks beginning in 2026 to push healthier purchases, according to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.