As of May 13, 2025, Congress is currently considering legislation that would substantially increase the number of people who must work 80 hours per month to receive benefits from the nation’s largest food assistance program—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The current House reconciliation bill would extend SNAP work requirements to households with school-age children, raise the maximum age when work requirements apply from 54 to 64, and limit states’ ability to request work requirement waivers for areas with high unemployment. People subject to the policy would be limited to three months of SNAP benefits within a 36-month period unless they meet the work requirement by working or participating in a qualifying work program. In this analysis, we show that the expanded SNAP work requirements would result in 2.7 million families and 5.4 million people losing some or all of their family’s SNAP benefits in a month, with an average loss of $254 per family per month.

Why This Matters

The SNAP work requirements proposed in the House reconciliation bill would be a major change to the program. Families with school-aged children could receive lower benefits, and in some cases lose assistance entirely, if the family’s adults do not meet the requirements. Applying the work requirement through age 64 represents another significant departure from current policy, which stops imposing these requirements at age 54. With employment at 2023 levels (the year used for our modeling), about 13 percent of that year’s monthly recipient families would lose benefits or receive lower benefits.

What We Found

We estimate that under the expanded work requirements:

• A total of 2.7 million families and 5.4 million people would be affected.
• 1.5 million families with 1.8 million people would lose benefits entirely.
• 1.2 million families with 3.6 million people, including 1.5 million children, would receive lower benefits because a family member does not meet the work requirement and can no longer be counted as eligible for SNAP.
• Families losing some or all their benefits would lose $254 per month on average (or slightly over $3,000 over a year). Families with children would lose $229 per month on average.
• 24,000 families with a child would lose SNAP benefits entirely and 870,000 would receive lower benefits, usually because a parent can no longer be counted as a SNAP recipient.
• 480,000 families with a member between 55 to 64 would lose benefits entirely and 312,000 would receive lower benefits. Currently, the work requirement does not apply to adults aged 55 and older.
• 2 million families losing some or all their benefits would include a member who currently works for at least part of the year.
• All states are affected, including states that currently are not using any waivers based on unemployment rates.

How We Did It

We used the Analysis of Transfers, Taxes, and Income Security (ATTIS) model to simulate the effects of expanded SNAP work requirements, compared with the current policies. ATTIS is a comprehensive microsimulation model of government programs affecting US households and can reflect the actual economic circumstances, benefit policies, and program caseloads in a particular year as well as hypothetical scenarios. We apply the model to combined 2022 and 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) data, adjusted to reflect 2023 income and population.