The People Just Above the Line
In 2024 nearly half of food-insecure Americans, an estimated 25 million people, may have had incomes too high for SNAP and too low to cover groceries. They're the part of hunger we tend 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's only part of the story. What's missing is big. Nearly half of the people who couldn't reliably afford food in 2024 may have had incomes too high for SNAP, the country's main food benefit.
SNAP has an income cutoff, and these people are above it, where the help simply stops, whether or not a family can actually cover groceries. To better understand the whole problem and how its pieces fit together, see How to Think About Food Insecurity.
Earning too much for SNAP and too little for food is not a contradiction. For millions, it's how an ordinary month goes.
SNAP's income cutoff is lower than most people think.
Federal rules set SNAP's gross income limit at 130 percent of the federal poverty line for households where no one is elderly or disabled. Gross income is the money a household brings in that SNAP counts, before anything is taken out. For a family of four, the limit from October 2026 through September 2027 is about $42,900 a year. Most states raise that limit. Fewer than a third of states keep it at 130 percent. More than half of all states set the limit at 200 percent of the poverty line, about $66,000 for that same family. North Carolina is one of them.
For a household where no one is elderly or disabled, cross the limit by a dollar and the benefit ends. The cutoff doesn't ask what rent costs in your county, or what a week of groceries runs at your store, or whether a medical bill ate up what was left last month. Only gross income counts, and the answer is yes or no. Plenty of households have incomes above the cutoff and still can't keep the refrigerator full.
Millions of people fall into this gap, and it comes from where the line is drawn.
Feeding America estimates that in 2024, 48 percent of all food-insecure people in the United States may have had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP. That was about 25 million people.
Who the line leaves out
Everyone facing hunger in the U.S., 2024, by estimated SNAP eligibility. Drawn to scale.
An estimated 48 percent of people facing hunger, about 25 million, may have had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP. Source: Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2026 (modeled estimates).
There's another kind of gap, too. Among the people who do qualify, not all are enrolled. The USDA estimates that about 12 percent of people eligible under federal rules weren't getting SNAP in an average month from October 2021 through September 2022. SNAP matters a lot, but these two gaps mean it's still far from reaching everyone who is food insecure.
The poverty line behind the cutoff is a national number. The price of groceries is a local one. In Buncombe, the two are a bad fit.
The cutoff treats a dollar in Asheville the same as a dollar in a low-cost county elsewhere in North Carolina. But Buncombe has one of the highest costs of living in the state. According to Just Economics of Western North Carolina, the 2026 living wage for a single adult here is $24.10 an hour. That's well above what many local jobs pay, and far above the SNAP line for a single adult. A person can earn too much for SNAP and still have nowhere near enough to pay for rent, groceries and everything else in Asheville.
That's why some of the people who use local pantries come straight from a shift. They're not gaming the system. They have jobs, they don't qualify for SNAP, and they run short on food.
A food pantry is one of the doors still open to them, though not for everything on its shelves. Food that a pantry gets from the federal government has its own income test. In North Carolina a household has to qualify for SNAP or sign a form saying its income is below 200 percent of the poverty line, the same limit SNAP uses here. That test does not apply to food from private donations. Feeding America says the number of people over SNAP's limit who face hunger "highlights the vital role of charitable food assistance." Whether charity can take SNAP's place is a separate question. It cannot, as Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger explains.
Hunger does not end at the eligibility line.
Qualifying for help and needing it are two different things. You can put a number on the gap between them: in 2024, about 25 million people, nearly half of everyone who was food insecure, may have had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP. Some of them have jobs. In a high-cost place like Buncombe, they're easy to find: one aisle over at the pantry, still in a work shirt.
The line is a choice about where help stops. Every county in a state gets the same line, no matter what food and rent cost there, and that line 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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