Who loses SNAP now?

Nationwide, SNAP enrollment fell to about 37.8 million people by February 2026, roughly 4.3 million fewer than a year before. That is a drop of about 10 percent. The Food Research & Action Center counts more than 5.5 million gone between January 2025 and March 2026. North Carolina's drop is among the steepest anywhere, from about 1.5 million people in January 2025 to under 1.2 million by March 2026. That is down about 22 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 the wider work rules, from renewals that now come more often and trip people up on the paperwork, and from new limits on which noncitizens can get help, all landing at once.

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 swollen pandemic-era rolls had been unwinding for a while on their own. What the law does is take that drift and make it policy. The roughly 90,000 the state expects to lose their benefits under the work rules are coming off now, through the recertifications that run into the summer of 2026, after the window these early numbers cover. So the sharpest part of the law's own effect is still ahead of the count, not behind it.

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 its removals include fraud, like benefits drawn on 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. Many of them already work, in day-labor and gig jobs that pay in cash and leave no clean record for a caseworker to see. The paperwork can drop them even when the work is real. They are also 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 before it had fully taken hold.

That is a large enough story to stand on its own, and we tell it separately in who we call homeless, which follows what happens when a work rule is aimed at people whose work was never the problem.

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 any work rule. They lose SNAP when their whole household's case closes, and more households are closing, mostly under the weight of the new paperwork rather than because their incomes rose.

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 December since the 1990s. The department called it redundant. The edition covering 2024 was the last one. It is the whole measurement that stopped, not just one report. The other hunger estimates people might point to are built on that same survey. Whatever the reason, there is no plan to count hunger for the years these changes take effect. 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 none of these changes cut that dollar amount. What they change is who qualifies. The new work rules reach more people, adults up to age 64 and parents of teenagers, 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, expect renewals to come around more often, and keep your proof of income and rent current, because a missing form is now one of the most common ways a case closes.

If you do not get SNAP: this still reaches you. About 29,000 of your Buncombe neighbors are on it, roughly one in ten people in the county. The roughly $60 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.