The purpose of this study is to describe the foods and beverages purchased by SNAP households, by using the most current data available.
We have studied school meal program operations for a long time. You can access published reports that go back to school year 1988-89. Each study in this series focuses on topics that are important to program operations at the time. Sometimes the studies also collect information about other child nutrition programs, like the Child and Adult Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program.
We regularly collect information about the school meal programs and how they operate from the people who know best – the state agencies that oversee the programs in each state and territory and the school food authorities that manage the programs locally in one or more schools.
This dashboard describes the economic and demographic characteristics of households participating in SNAP by state and over time, as well as SNAP participation rates by state and by household characteristic.
We periodically examine how SNAP households use their monthly EBT benefits, including number of purchase transactions per month, average purchase amount, types of retailers frequented, and rate at which households exhaust their benefits over the month. This study, the fourth in the series, was done to assess monthly EBT redemption patterns during FY 2022 when SNAP EBT benefits were much larger than usual due to pandemic funding. By FY 2022, SNAP households could also use SNAP EBT to purchase groceries from authorized online retailers, so we analyzed benefits redeemed through online purchasing.
We periodically examine SNAP benefit redemption patterns related to the timing, number, and dollar amount of transactions and the rate at which households spend down and exhaust their monthly benefits. These studies also report on the number of transactions made and the share of benefits redeemed at various types of stores.
We release annual reports describing the persons and households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This report uses the fiscal year 2023 SNAP Quality Control data to examine the demographic characteristics and economic circumstances of SNAP households at the national and state level.
We publish national SNAP participation rates, which are estimated percentages of people who are eligible for SNAP who participate in the program. On this page, you can access published reports that go back to 1994. Each report includes national participation and benefit receipt rates for all individuals, households, and certain subgroups. Most reports compare rates across fiscal years to demonstrate recent trends in SNAP participation.
We publish SNAP participation rates for each state, which are estimated percentages of all people who are eligible for SNAP who participate in the program. For most years, we also estimate participation rates for “working poor” people, who are eligible people that live in households with income from a job. On this page, you can access published reports that go back to 1994. Each link includes a research brief, and a technical report detailing the methodology used.