SNAP winners and losers: Which states are facing possible funding cuts?

(NEXSTAR) – Time is ticking for states to slash their error rates or risk losing a sizable amount of federal funding for SNAP.

The pressure comes from a law passed last year that ties error rates to federal funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the program formerly known as Food Stamps.

States need to meet a target error rate under 6% to avoid being impacted, but so far only a small minority have made the cut. As of the 2025 fiscal year , only nine states had error rates under 6% and 41 states were still in trouble.

The error rate refers to the percentage of SNAP benefits paid either above or below what people should have received, primarily because of mistakes. It includes overpayments and underpayments, but overpayments are more common.

The national average error rate is about 11%.

So far, only nine states have met the new 6% goal: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Everyone else still has some work to do – and some states have a lot of work to do. Alaska has the highest error rate in the country at 23%. If that sounds bad, it’s a big improvement from 2023, when the state’s error rate was 60%.

The state’s error rate is so high, the Department of Health said, because it has been prioritizing keeping food assistance going, even when some documentation was missing. “While this approach helped protect access to food assistance, it increased the risk of procedural and administrative errors,” spokesperson Megan Darrow previously told Anchorage Daily News .

See your state’s SNAP error rate by exploring the map below.

Most states have just one more year to get their acts together. Federal law says states can choose to use either their 2025 or 2026 error rates when determining what percentage of SNAP benefits they must pay starting in October 2027, so last year’s numbers (in the map above) were the first to count.

Error rates are so high in Alaska, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and D.C. that they’ll be given at least one more year to try and reduce them.

What happens in states with high error rates?

In states where error rates remain above 6%, the law doesn’t directly cut the benefits SNAP recipients are paid. Instead, it forces states to come up with the funding themselves. States will be forced to shoulder 5% to 15% of benefit costs, depending on how bad their error rate is.

The indirect effect, however, may still end up being that families who rely on SNAP see their monthly allotment go down. As a result of the cost shift, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that some states will end up reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits for about 300,000 people. Subsidies through child nutrition programs could also decrease for about 96,000 children.

Consider Missouri as an example. It had an error rate of 8.7% last year. Unless it improves next year, the state will have to pick up 10% of SNAP benefit costs starting in October 2027.

Missouri residents received about $1.5 billion of SNAP benefits in 2024, the latest year for which federal data is available. If that same amount of benefits is paid in the future, Missouri could have to cover $150 million of the costs; that’s a sum greater than the total budgeted for several state prisons.

As potential funding cuts loom, SNAP aid has already been dropping faster than expected since the 2025 passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which tightened up several eligibility requirements.

Data show SNAP enrollment fell from 42.2 million in May 2025 to 36.6 million in May, a drop of more than 13% in a year. The May data are preliminary and could be revised.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.