This report provides estimates of the percentage of individuals eligible for SNAP under the federal income and asset guidelines who participated in an average month in 2013. It provides national estimates for the general population and for subgroups, including children, the elderly, people living in households with various income sources, and noncitizens.
FNS developed the Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification (APEC) study series, which collects and analyzes data from a nationally representative sample of schools and school food authorities (SFAs) about every 5 years. APEC allows FNS to develop a national estimate of erroneous payment rates and amounts in three key areas: certification error, meal claiming error and aggregation error. FNS recently completed APEC II, which collected data in School Year 2012-2013 and this report summarizes those findings.
This report – part of an annual series – presents estimates of the percentage of eligible persons, by state, who participated in SNAP during an average month in FY 2012 and in the two previous fiscal years. This report also presents estimates of state participation rates for eligible “working poor” individuals (people in eligible households with earnings) over the same period.
The study collected data on-site on food, labor, and other meal production costs for a five day period. A major goal was to test the feasibility of identifying meal production costs that were not charged to the SFA account (to obtain full costs) and directly allocating costs to different SFA activities.