Who loses SNAP now?

Nationwide, SNAP enrollment fell to about 36.6 million people by May 2026, roughly 5.7 million fewer than a year before. That is a drop of about 13 percent, on a count USDA still marks preliminary. North Carolina's rolls are falling fast too. On the state's own count they went from about 1.47 million people in March 2025 to about 1.25 million in July 2026, down about 15 percent. The state health department expects the new work rules alone to cost about 90,000 more North Carolina adults their benefits. The drop is not from any single change. It comes from several changes: the wider work rules and new limits on which noncitizens can get help, both of which took effect partway through a decline already under way, and the paperwork of renewal, where one missing form can close a case.

One honest caution on the timing. Much of that drop came before the new work rules even took effect on December 1, 2025. So the 2025 law did not cause all of it. The state's rolls had already been falling since early 2025, after a rise in the last months of 2024. What the law does is take that drift and make it policy. The roughly 90,000 people the state expects will lose their benefits under the work rules come off case by case: each is screened at their next renewal and loses benefits only after three full months without meeting the hours or having good cause. The national count above stops at May 2026. So part of that wave sits inside these numbers and part of it is still ahead of them.

Supporters of the law read that drop differently, as the program dropping people who never should have been on it. Some of it is exactly that. Ineligible cases and paperwork errors get cleared out, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture says it removes cases involving fraud, like benefits drawn using dead people's Social Security numbers. But the department has not shown how many of the people who left were actually ineligible, and researchers who went looking for a happier explanation did not find one. There is little sign the economy improved enough to explain a drop this size. The more likely story is much simpler. Eligible people are losing benefits because the rules got harder to satisfy, not because they stopped needing food.

Supporters make one promise about the work rules that can be checked against evidence: that they move people from aid into jobs. Economists have studied earlier versions of the same rule. The most careful of that work, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, found the requirement cut SNAP enrollment by about half among the adults it covered while producing no measurable rise in employment. A fresh 2026 study reached the same conclusion: tougher requirements thinned the rolls and left employment flat. Even the studies most favorable to the rules find at most a small bump in work, and a shaky one. People left the rolls. On the whole, they did not end up in jobs. That is the gap between what the rule is sold as and what the record shows it does.

The work rules do not fall evenly. They fall hardest on one group in particular: people without a stable home. They are the people the old law had tried to shield: Congress added an exemption for homeless adults in 2023, and the 2025 law repealed that exemption less than two years after states had to start applying it.

A second way out disappeared at the same time, and it never depended on the person at all. A state could ask Washington to pause the three-month limit across a whole area that did not have enough jobs to go around. The 2025 law removed that reason. Outside Alaska and Hawaii the only ground left is an area unemployment rate above 10 percent, and on October 3, 2025 the Agriculture Department told states it would end any waiver still running on the old ground within thirty days.

The rules that remain are more generous than they look. A state agency cannot require you to have a fixed mailing address to get food help; that is federal regulation, 7 CFR 273.3. North Carolina's own manual for caseworkers goes further. Self-attestation, meaning your own word, "must be accepted" when someone claims an exemption from the work rules, "unless questionable." Chronic homelessness can establish that a person is unfit for work when the conditions of it are what keep them from working 20 hours a week, and that call rests with the caseworker. Where the unfitness is obvious, workers "must not request medical documentation." Good cause is to be applied "liberally."

So on paper the door is open. The question is whether it opens the same way at the counter, when the office is short-staffed, the work of checking hours has grown, and a missing form is one of the quietest ways a case gets closed. A permissive rule and a permissive caseworker are not the same thing.

That gap is a large enough story to stand on its own, and we take it up separately in who we call homeless.

Children are leaving in outsized numbers. ProPublica looked at the twelve states that report enrollment by age and found about 776,000 fewer children on SNAP, about 46 percent of those states' total drop. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put the figure for those same twelve states at more than 700,000, and noted the real national number is higher because most states do not report by age. Children are not subject to the work rule driving these losses. They lose SNAP when their whole household's case closes, and that is happening to more households. Some experts ProPublica spoke to say the added paperwork of staying eligible may be pushing people off.

The main way the government measured hunger is also gone. In September 2025, the USDA ended the survey behind its annual food security report, the food questions the Census Bureau had asked households every year since 1995. The department called it redundant. The edition covering 2024 was the last one. What stopped is the benchmark, not every count. The Census Bureau still asks a short set of questions about whether a household had enough to eat, and it is still publishing them. Those questions were never the measure the food security report was built on, and they cannot be lined up against thirty years of it. So there is no plan to measure the years these changes take effect the way the last thirty years were measured. Anyone waiting for the official numbers to show what happened will be waiting for a report that is not coming.

Here is what all of this means for people at home.

If you get SNAP in Buncombe County: your monthly benefit is set by a federal formula, and the law kept that formula. It did bar any future review of the food plan behind the maximum benefit from raising its cost, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to make the average benefit lower than it would otherwise be, starting in 2027. And it narrowed what counts toward one of the deductions inside the formula, the shelter deduction, in two ways. A household with no older adult and no disabled member can no longer claim the higher utility allowance just by receiving heating aid, and an internet service fee no longer counts toward the shelter deduction. Losing either one can lower the monthly amount. Who qualifies is still the bigger change. The new work rules reach more people: adults ages 55 to 64, adults in a household whose youngest child is 14 to 17, and veterans, homeless adults and young adults who aged out of foster care, all of whom were exempt before the 2025 law. Someone in one of these groups can still be exempt on other grounds, such as receiving disability benefits or being unable to work 20 hours a week. So some people who get help today will lose it. The state expects about 90,000 North Carolina adults to fall off. Buncombe's slice of that is not public yet, but the county is not exempt. If your case is still open, keep your proof of income and rent current, because a missing form at renewal can close a case.

If you do not get SNAP: this still reaches you. About 25,000 of your Buncombe neighbors are on it, roughly one in eleven people in the county, down from about 29,000 in 2025. The roughly $50 million a year they spend with it runs through the same checkout lines you stand in, from Ingles, the grocer headquartered up the road in Black Mountain, to the tailgate markets. When the rolls shrink, that spending shrinks with them. And you help pay for the changes: the county and state cost of all this is the next piece in this series, who pays for SNAP now →

The people who need the help did not change this year. What changed is how many of them the law is willing to feed.