A wave of paperwork is about to decide whether millions of American households keep help buying groceries. A 2025 law rewrote the work rules for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and one of the most detailed analyses of the change estimates that more than 5 million people now live in households at risk of losing at least some of their food benefits. That group, roughly one in eight SNAP participants, includes an estimated 800,000 children and more than half a million adults who are 65 or older or have disabilities.
What the One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed about SNAP
The rules come from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax-and-spending package signed into law on July 4, 2025. The law expanded SNAP’s long-standing work requirement for so-called able-bodied adults without dependents, known in the program as ABAWDs. Under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service rules, an ABAWD who does not meet the requirement can receive benefits for only three months in any three-year period unless they work, train, or volunteer at least 80 hours a month, or qualify for an exemption.
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The age ceiling now reaches 64
The biggest single shift is who has to meet that 80-hour test. The old ABAWD time limit generally topped out at age 54. The new law pushed the ceiling all the way to 64, sweeping in a large group of people in their late 50s and early 60s who had never before had to log work or volunteer hours to keep their groceries. For many of these older adults, tracking and reporting 80 hours a month is a genuinely new burden, and one they may not learn about until a benefit notice lands in the mailbox.
The 80 hours can be met with paid work, unpaid volunteering, an approved job-training or education program, or any combination of the three. But the requirement only helps if the state agency has documentation. Hours that are worked but never reported can still count against a household, which is why the change lands so heavily on people who are, in fact, already working.
Where the 5 million and 800,000 figures come from
The estimate that more than 5 million people are at risk comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which modeled how the expanded rules ripple through households. Because SNAP benefits are calculated for a whole household, an adult who loses eligibility can shrink the food budget for everyone under the same roof, including children and elderly relatives who are not personally subject to the work test. The center’s analysis estimates that roughly 800,000 children and more than half a million adults 65 or older or with disabilities live in these at-risk households.
It is worth being precise about what that number means. It is an estimate of people at risk of losing at least some benefits, not a count of people already cut off. The enacted law and the rising age cutoffs are real and in force; the 5 million figure is a projection of how many could be affected as states phase the rules in and recertifications come due.
Fewer exemptions, and a shrinking caseload
The law did not only raise the age. It also narrowed the exemptions that had automatically excused certain groups, including some veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults who had aged out of foster care. The caregiver carve-out tightened as well. As those protections shrank and the age band widened, SNAP enrollment has already fallen sharply. Participation has dropped about 13.5 percent, from roughly 42.2 million people to about 36.6 million, according to program data cited in reporting on the changes. Not every departure traces to the work rules, but the direction is clear, and the work requirement is a major driver.
What a household loses when benefits stop
For a family relying on SNAP, the hit is immediate and concrete. The average benefit works out to roughly $6 per person per day, so losing an allotment for even one adult can strip a meaningful share from a monthly grocery budget already squeezed by food prices. When a household loses eligibility entirely, the shortfall often lands at the same food banks and pantries that families turn to as a last resort.
The practical defense is documentation. People who are working, volunteering, or enrolled in training should confirm that their state SNAP office has proof of their hours, and should ask directly when their case comes up for recertification. Anyone who believes an exemption applies, such as being medically unable to work, pregnant, or caring for a young child, should gather that paperwork before a notice arrives rather than after. SNAP’s own Employment and Training program is one of the cleaner ways to satisfy the requirement, since enrollment generally counts toward the 80 hours and can come with help for transportation or job searching.
Older adults are the ones most exposed
The jump in the age ceiling is why this change is landing hardest on people in their late 50s and early 60s. Someone who is 61 and out of full-time work, perhaps because of a layoff, a health setback, or the physical toll of a lifetime of manual labor, now has to log qualifying hours every month to keep a benefit they may have relied on quietly for years. That is a very different situation from a younger adult with more job options and fewer health limits, yet the same 80-hour rule applies to both.
For a household on a fixed or shrinking income, the loss compounds. An older adult who loses SNAP does not just lose the grocery money; the paperwork demands themselves, from tracking hours to filing exemption requests, can be a real barrier for people managing chronic conditions or limited mobility. That combination, higher stakes and higher hurdles, is exactly why so many of the people the analyses flag as at risk are people who ought to keep their benefits and simply get tangled in the process.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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