The People Just Above the Line
An estimated 25 million food-insecure Americans, nearly half, likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP. They are the working households who make too much for help and too little for groceries, and they are the part of hunger we are trained not to picture.
Ask most people to describe someone going hungry in America and you get the same picture: out of work, out of luck, probably without a home. That picture is real, but it is only part of the story. The missing part is large. A great many of the people who cannot reliably afford food have jobs, pay rent, and earn just enough to be turned away from the country's main food benefit.
They sit a little above a line. SNAP, the federal food program, cuts off eligibility at an income threshold. Above that point the help simply stops, whether or not a family can actually cover groceries. The line is a number on a federal form. Hunger does not check the form before it arrives. (For how the pieces fit together, start with the companion primer, How to Think About Food Insecurity.)
Earning too much for help and too little for food is not a contradiction. For millions, it is the ordinary shape of the month.
SNAP eligibility turns on an income cutoff, and the cutoff is lower than most people assume.
To receive SNAP, a household's gross income generally has to fall at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that came to roughly $41,800 a year in 2025. Some states lift the ceiling toward 200 percent of poverty, about $64,300 for that same family. But across much of the country the 130 percent mark is the wall.
Cross it by a dollar and the benefit ends. The cutoff does not ask what rent costs in your county, or what a week of groceries runs at your store, or whether a medical bill ate the margin last month. It asks one question, about gross income, and answers in a single word. Plenty of households clear that bar and still cannot keep the refrigerator full.
Far from a rare edge case, this gap is built into how the program is drawn.
Feeding America's county-level study estimates that in 2024, about 25 million people, roughly 48 percent of everyone experiencing food insecurity in the United States, may have earned too much to qualify for SNAP. Nearly half of hungry Americans, in other words, are likely on the wrong side of the line.
Who the line leaves out
Everyone facing hunger in the U.S., 2024, by likely SNAP eligibility. Drawn to scale.
An estimated 48 percent of people facing hunger, about 25 million, likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP. And not everyone in the other group is enrolled. Source: Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2026 (modeled estimates).
There is another kind of gap, too. Among the people who do qualify, not all are enrolled. The USDA estimates that about 12 percent of those eligible do not receive benefits, whether from paperwork, stigma, or simply not knowing they qualify. Put the two groups together and the program, vital as it is, reaches far fewer people than the full number who are hungry.
The cutoff is a national number. The cost of a grocery cart is a local one. In Buncombe, the two pull hard against each other.
A federal income cutoff treats a dollar in Asheville the same as a dollar in a low-cost county three states away. But Buncombe carries one of the highest costs of living in North Carolina. Just Economics of Western North Carolina set a living wage for a single adult here at $24.10 an hour for 2026. That is well above what much local work pays, and far above the SNAP line. A person can earn enough to lose eligibility and nowhere near enough to absorb Asheville rent and Asheville grocery prices.
That is why the line at a local pantry includes people who walked in straight from a shift. They are not gaming anything. They are employed, ineligible, and short on food at the same time, which the math allows and the stereotype does not.
The food bank is the one part of the system with a door for them. Pantries do not run SNAP's income test, which is exactly why the charitable network matters for this group. It is why food banks count the income-ineligible among the people they exist to serve. That is a separate question from whether charity can replace the federal benefit; it cannot, and that is taken up in a companion piece, Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger.
Hunger does not end at the eligibility line.
Qualifying for help and needing it are two different things. The distance between them has a number: about 25 million people, nearly half of the food insecure, likely earning just enough to be turned away from SNAP. Most of them are working, and in a high-cost place like Buncombe they are easy to find, one aisle over at the pantry, still in a work shirt.
The line is not a fact of the world; it is a choice about where help stops, drawn with little regard for what food and rent cost in any particular county, and it can be drawn differently. Until it is, the fairest thing we can do is stop picturing hunger as something that happens only to other kinds of people, and start seeing the neighbor who earns a paycheck and still runs out of food before the month is over.
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