A modestly priced meal cost $3.57 in the last quarter of 2025, 23% more than the maximum SNAP benefit.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program), helped roughly 42 million Americans buy food for themselves and their families at the end of 2025. But the maximum benefit doesn’t always cover the cost of a modestly priced meal, which may contribute to increased food insecurity among many families receiving SNAP benefits.
This map compares the maximum SNAP benefit per meal with the county-level average cost of a modestly priced meal in 2025. Because the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) adjusts SNAP benefits every fiscal year to respond to inflation’s impact on food prices, the 2025 data in the map cover two periods: (1) January to September 2025, reflecting the fiscal year 2025 cost-of-living adjustment, and (2) October to December 2025, when the maximum benefit reflected the fiscal year 2026 cost-of-living adjustment. We also provide historical data back to January 2022, which reflect cost-of-living adjustments for fiscal years 2022 through 2024.
Explore data for your county, or filter by rural-urban continuum codes to see patterns by metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas.
View a previous iteration of this tool to see similar data for 2020 through 2021.
Key Findings
In 2025, food prices in the US were 32 percent higher than they were in 2020. This is primarily because of large increases in the price of food in 2022 and, to a lesser extent, 2023. In 2024, 14.4 percent of Americans were food insecure, just below the rate experienced at the height of the Great Recession (16.6 percent).
These trends follow several changes that have affected the sufficiency of SNAP benefits over the past five years. In 2021, the reevaluated Thrifty Food Plan increased the maximum SNAP benefit by 21 percent and significantly improved the benefits’ adequacy by decreasing the share of counties with a gap between SNAP benefits and meal costs from 99 to 78 percent.
Recent federal policy changes have undermined that progress, however. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which made the largest federal funding reductions to SNAP to date. The legislation limits SNAP’s ability to bridge the pervasive gap between the price of a moderately priced meal and SNAP benefits by requiring that updates to the Thrifty Food Plan be cost neutral. Given that the Thrifty Food Plan is the primary mechanism used to raise SNAP benefits, enforcing cost neutrality will make it harder to improve benefit adequacy in the future.
To understand how well SNAP helped families afford the cost of a meal amid these conditions, we compared the cost of a modestly priced meal with the maximum SNAP benefit in 2025 before and after the US Department of Agriculture’s fiscal year 2026 cost-of-living adjustment.
Before the fiscal year 2026 cost-of-living adjustment (in January to September 2025), we find the following.
- The maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99 percent of counties. The benefit covered meal costs in only 27 of the 3,144 counties.
- Nationally, the average meal cost $0.72 (25 percent) more than the national average maximum benefit of $2.85. The maximum benefit fell short of meeting monthly meal costs by $66.96.
- Overall, 3 in 4 (76 percent) counties had a meal price more than 50 cents higher than the maximum SNAP benefit—up from 53 percent in 2024. These counties constitute about 90 percent of the US population.
- Some counties have a significant gap between the cost of a meal and the maximum SNAP benefit. The five counties with the largest gaps were New York County, New York; Leelanau County, Michigan; Teton County, Idaho; Teton County, Wyoming; and San Francisco County, California. Each had a meal price more than 80 percent higher than the maximum benefit, and New York County’s meal price was more than double the maximum benefit. Idaho’s and Wyoming’s Teton Counties are rural (with a 7 and 9 rural-urban continuum code, respectively) and near tourist areas, while the other three counties are urban. Visit Urban’s Data Catalog to see the top 20 rural and urban counties with the largest gaps.
- Compared with rural areas, urban areas had a larger gap between the cost of a meal and the maximum SNAP benefit. On average, the cost of a meal exceeded the maximum benefit by $0.98 (34 percent) in urban areas and by $0.67 (24 percent) in rural areas.
The implementation of the 2026 cost-of-living adjustment in October 2025 (which remained in place until September 30, 2026) had little effect on the adequacy of SNAP benefits.
ABOUT
How do we estimate the SNAP benefit per meal?
The maximum SNAP benefit is the same for all counties in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, DC, and is adjusted for Alaska and Hawaii. Because we are interested in how well the maximum benefit can help people afford the cost of a modestly priced meal in their communities, we take an average of the maximum benefit each household size can receive and adjust it for each household size’s share of SNAP enrollees in 2024. We then divide the monthly benefit by the typical number of meals we assume people consume each month.
Before the fiscal year 2026 cost-of-living adjustment (January through September 2025), we arrive at a per-meal maximum benefit of $2.84 for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia, $3.67 in Alaska, and $5.03 in Hawaii. The national average weighted by county-level population sizes is $2.85. After the fiscal year 2026 cost-of-living adjustment (October through December 2025), we arrive at a per-meal maximum benefit of $2.90 for the 48 contiguous states, $3.75 in Alaska, and $4.93 Hawaii. The national average weighted by county-level population sizes is $2.91
How do we calculate the average cost of a meal?
We use weekly reported food expenditures from the 2024 Current Population Survey and divide by meals eaten per week. We restrict the responses to those from households with incomes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, the federal guideline for SNAP gross income eligibility. We also restrict responses from people who are food secure, as food insecure families are likely underspending on food, even for a Thrifty Food Plan meal, because of limited resources. When calculating a national average meal cost across counties, we weight county meal costs by the estimated number of SNAP participants in each county. On average, the national cost of a meal for households meeting our criteria was $3.48 in 2024. We then used the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator to trend this upward to a meal cost in 2025, arriving at an estimated meal cost of $3.57 for December of that year.
How do we adjust the average meal cost for food prices by county?
We adjust the national cost per meal ($3.57) for the relative prices paid for the Thrifty Food Plan market basket in each county in the US. Our source for a county-level food price index is Feeding America’s annual Map the Meal Gap study, which is based on food price data contributed by NielsenIQ. We then translate the total market basket (including any applicable state and county sales taxes on groceries) into an adjustment factor that can be applied to any dollar amount. This adjustment differs by county, revealing differences in food costs at the county level.
PROJECT CREDITS
This project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts.
We are grateful for the data contributions from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study (supported by Conagra Brands Foundation), which uses food price data contributed by NielsenIQ to estimate county-level meal costs. We especially appreciate the assistance of Adam Dewey at Feeding America in updating the analysis and reviewing final products.
RESEARCH Elaine Waxman, Poonam Gupta, Matthew P. Rabbitt, and Craig Gundersen from Baylor University
DESIGN Brittney Spinner and Christina Baird
DEVELOPMENT Evy Park, Jessica Kelly, Rachel Marconi, and Ben Chartoff
EDITING Alex Dallman and Michael Marazzi
WRITING Rachel Kenney, Serena Lei, and Emily Peiffer
View the project on Github.
