A federal tracking page run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration lists twenty-three approved state waivers letting SNAP agencies block certain purchases, from candy to energy drinks, on the government benefit card. Read literally, that page supports a narrower number: only eighteen of those twenty-three rows carry a live start date a retailer can actually plan around. The other five sit on the same table only because a federal court told USDA to leave the notice up, vacated but not deleted, a distinction most coverage of the state count has missed entirely.
How USDA Counts to Twenty-Three, and Why the Live Number Is Eighteen
The federal waiver table runs one row per state, and as of its most recent update it holds twenty-three rows total. Five of those rows, though, do not list a target implementation date at all. In place of a date, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia each carry the same standing notice: a June 22, 2026 order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in Aragon et al. v. Rollins et al., that vacated USDA’s approval of the waiver and blocked its implementation from proceeding. Subtract those five from the twenty-three and eighteen states remain with an actual, dated start.
That subtraction is the arithmetic most summaries skip. A count that simply tallies every row on the federal waiver table, without checking whether the row still has a working date attached, arrives at twenty-three approved states. A count that asks which states can actually flip the switch on a given day lands at eighteen. Both numbers describe the same federal document; only one describes a rule a shopper will run into at checkout.
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The Five States Sitting on a Vacated Approval
Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia all had their soda, candy or sweetened-beverage restrictions approved earlier in 2026, and all five appear on retailer guidance pages describing exactly which items would have been blocked. The Aragon litigation changed that. Iowa’s restriction, the broadest of the group, would have covered nearly every taxable food item under state revenue rules; Nebraska’s waiver was set to expand from sodas and energy drinks to include candy on November 1. Colorado’s paused waiver targeted soft drinks specifically, while Tennessee’s and West Virginia’s covered a wider mix of processed foods and soda. Both Iowa and Nebraska are now paused at the federal level, and USDA’s retailer notices for those two states instruct stores to stop any waiver-related blocking they may have already built into point-of-sale systems. None of the five has a new target date; they remain listed only as a record of what the court vacated, not as states with restrictions on any near-term horizon.
The Eighteen States With a Standing Start Date
The states with a live date span nearly two years. Utah and Indiana carry the earliest start dates on the table, both effective January 1, 2026, restricting soft drinks in Utah and soft drinks and candy in Indiana. Nevada carries the latest, a February 1, 2028 date restricting candy and sugar-sweetened beverages. Between those two ends sit a mix of restriction lists — Arkansas and Louisiana both cover soda, energy drinks and candy; Kansas and Missouri push their start dates into 2027; Ohio and Virginia focus narrowly on sugar-sweetened beverages and fountain drinks; Florida and South Carolina add prepared desserts and energy drinks to their lists; and North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas all land in the middle of the range with variations on soda-and-candy restrictions. Each of the eighteen has its own retailer notice spelling out exactly which products its EBT terminals will decline once the date arrives, and the lists genuinely differ from state to state rather than following one federal template.
What Actually Changes at the Register
None of these waivers change who qualifies for SNAP or how much a household receives. What changes is which items an EBT card will authorize at checkout once a state’s date takes effect: a retailer’s point-of-sale system is updated to decline the restricted category, the same way it already declines non-food items. Exceptions carved into most of the waivers are narrow and specific — plain or flavored water, milk and milk substitutes, drinks over 50 percent real juice, and in several states, protein bars and meal-replacement products stay eligible. Idaho’s retailer notice, for example, spells out that candy and soda are blocked but that granola, trail mix and similar nut- or fruit-based snacks are not, a distinction the point-of-sale system has to sort out automatically rather than a cashier judging item by item. A household’s benefit amount and eligibility rules are untouched; only the list of what the card will ring up at the register moves.
Montana’s Own Agency Has Already Revised Its Date Once
Montana sits among the eighteen with a listed date, but its own health department now says that date has moved. USDA’s table still lists Montana’s target as September 30, 2026, while Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services states directly on its program page that the implementation date has been delayed to November 1, 2026. That gap between what the federal tracker shows and what the implementing state agency has actually posted is worth watching across other states on the list, though Montana’s shift is a story of its own rather than a reason to revise the eighteen-state count here — the federal table, vacated rows aside, is still the best available cross-state record of who has an approved waiver at all.
The pattern across all twenty-three rows is the same: a federal approval is not the same thing as a court’s final word, and a target date on a government table is not the same thing as a state agency’s most current posting. For households budgeting around a SNAP card, the number that matters is neither twenty-three nor eighteen in the abstract — it is whichever single state’s row, and whichever state agency’s own page, actually applies to them.
The Gap Between the Federal Table and a Household’s Own Renewal Clock
The waiver table above settles how many states have an approved purchase restriction, but it says nothing about the paperwork that keeps a SNAP or Medicaid case open in the first place. Renewal packets, income reviews and reporting deadlines run on their own clock, separate from any waiver, and a missed one can end a household’s coverage faster than any purchase restriction changes what the card can buy. Nothing on USDA’s table tracks that clock, because that is not what the table is for.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer opens with the 90-day window after coverage is dropped and includes 51 state packs covering each state’s own renewal rules.
Look up a 13-page organizer in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
