The U.S. Department of Agriculture closed the books on fiscal year 2025 food stamp accuracy on June 24, 2026, and one state stood far apart from the other 49. Alaska’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payment error rate came in at 23.15 percent — the highest of any state in the country, and more than double the next-worst result. For a program that sends grocery money to tens of millions of households every month, a rate that high means a large share of Alaska’s SNAP cases were calculated wrong, either paying a household too much or too little of what the rules allow.
Alaska’s 23.15 Percent Tops Every State in USDA’s FY2025 Audit
USDA’s fiscal year 2025 payment error rate table lists Alaska’s combined error rate at 23.15 percent, the single highest figure of the 50 states. The District of Columbia came in second at 18.66 percent, followed by New Mexico at 16.81 percent, Delaware at 16.00 percent and Georgia at 15.21 percent — all well below Alaska’s number. The national payment error rate for FY2025 landed at 10.62 percent, meaning Alaska’s rate ran more than double the country’s already-elevated average, and more than nine times the 2.47 percent posted by South Dakota, the best-performing state in the same audit.
What ends coverage most often: Not ineligibility, but a renewal packet returned late or missing one document. See the renewal document checklist in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
Two Different Errors Add Up to One Ugly Number
Alaska’s 23.15 percent is not a single kind of mistake. The USDA table splits it into 20.58 percentage points of overpayments and 2.57 percentage points of underpayments. An overpayment means a household’s caseworker calculated a benefit higher than the eligibility rules allow — too much income excluded, a deduction applied that shouldn’t have been, a household size recorded incorrectly — and that household can later face a state claim to repay the difference. An underpayment means the opposite: a household received less food money than it was legally due, often because a deduction it qualified for, such as a shelter or utility cost, was never applied. Both outcomes trace back to the same root cause the audit measures — an eligibility worker or an automated system getting the arithmetic wrong on a real case file, not a recipient lying about their circumstances.
A 6 Percent Threshold Alaska Blew Past Nearly Fourfold
Congress set 6 percent as the payment error rate a state is allowed before facing consequences, and Alaska’s 23.15 percent is nearly four times that line. Under USDA’s own account of the rules, states at or above 6 percent must submit a Corrective Action Plan to the Food and Nutrition Administration laying out how they intend to fix the root cause of their errors, and some may face a separate quality-control penalty on top of it. “These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in USDA’s June 24 announcement of the results. The same release notes that a newer law now ties a state’s error rate to a share of its own SNAP benefit costs — 5, 10 or 15 percent, rising with the error rate — that states will be responsible for covering starting as soon as October 1, 2027, with the FY2025 numbers marking the first year USDA could use to calculate those shares.
Where Alaska Sits Against the Rest of the Map
USDA’s payment error rate index shows the full spread of state performance, and it is wide. South Dakota’s 2.47 percent was the lowest in the country, followed by Idaho at 3.85 percent, Wyoming at 3.96 percent, Kentucky at 4.70 percent and Iowa at 5.34 percent — five states that came in under half the national average while Alaska ran more than nine times higher than the best of them. Only four other jurisdictions broke 15 percent at all, and none came within eight full points of Alaska’s total. That gap is what makes Alaska’s result an outlier rather than part of a general trend of rising error rates; most states cluster well below the 15 percent mark USDA treats as seriously elevated.
What the Number Means for an Alaska Household
A state-level percentage translates into individual case actions. Every case USDA’s quality control reviewers sampled and found in error becomes either a debt a household now owes the state or a payment the state owes back to a household, and Alaska’s high rate means a larger-than-typical share of its caseload is sitting in one of those two positions. The audit itself does not name which households were affected — that determination happens case by case, through the state’s own quality control review — but the scale of the error rate is USDA’s own signal that Alaska’s SNAP office has more of that individual casework to work through than almost anywhere else in the country, on top of the corrective action plan it now owes the federal government.
The Same Paperwork Gap Behind Both Overpayments and Lost Coverage
A state’s error rate and a household’s own case both trace back to the same weak point: eligibility files built on paperwork that changed, went missing, or never got updated when a household’s income or household size shifted. That gap is exactly where an overpayment claim, an underpayment, or an outright loss of coverage tends to start.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer is a 13-page organizer with 51 state packs and a renewal and reporting calendar built to keep a household’s own file current between reviews.
Read the renewal and reporting calendar in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources.
