On July 1, 2025, the US Senate passed its version of the budget reconciliation bill. As with the House’s version of the bill, the Senate bill includes substantial changes to how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) program operates and is funded. In this summary, we present preliminary findings on how changes to the SNAP program in the Senate’s version of the reconciliation bill would affect families across the US.

Why This Matters

The Senate bill proposes major changes to the SNAP program, with the potential to reduce or eliminate benefits for millions of families across the US. Our analysis seeks to understand how these changes will affect families, including families with children and working families. We also examine how the impacts will vary across states.

What We Found

Our preliminary estimates of the SNAP policies in the Senate bill show the following:

• 22.3 million US families would be affected, losing some or all of their SNAP benefits.
• Of the total affected families, 5.3 million would lose at least $25 in SNAP benefits per month. Among these families, 3.3 million are families with children, 3.5 million are working families, and 1.7 million are families with a full-time full-year worker.
• Families losing at least $25 per month would lose $146 per month on average ($1,752 for a full-year recipient).
• At the state level, average monthly benefit losses for families losing at least $25 per month would range from $72 in Kansas ($864 annually) to $231 in the District of Columbia ($2,772 annually).

How We Did It

We used the Analysis of Transfers, Taxes, and Income Security (ATTIS) microsimulation model to estimate the impacts of key changes to the SNAP program. We estimate the policy impacts by comparing the proposed changes to the current law. To project the impact of the SNAP changes outlined in the Senate bill, we consider the effects of the following key provisions:

• Thrifty Food Plan: capping future increases based on inflation, as reflected in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers; limiting benefits for very large assistance units
• Work requirements: extending the three-month time limit for able-bodied adults who do not meet an 80 hour per month work requirement to people ages 55 through 64, parents of children aged 14 to 17, and veterans; restricting state waivers to areas with unemployment above 10 percent
• Matching funds requirements: requiring states with payment error rates at or above 6 percent to pay a portion of benefit costs, ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent of costs, depending on the state’s payment error rate
• Eligibility for certain noncitizens: limiting eligibility to US citizens and lawful permanent residents and removing eligibility for refugees and asylees who have not obtained lawful permanent resident status