Two states, two sets of 60 days. Virginia’s Department of Social Services says an old SNAP card deactivates 60 days after the new card is mailed, whether or not the household has activated the replacement. New Jersey’s cards expire 60 days after new ones are issued. The counting starts at a different moment in each state, and that difference decides how much time a household really has.
Virginia counts from the day the envelope leaves
Virginia began issuing chip-enabled SNAP EBT cards in September 2026, according to the state’s chip card website, and expects every EBT customer to hold one by December 31, 2026. The site’s wording on the old card is direct: it “will automatically deactivate 60 days after the new card is mailed, even if you have not activated the new one.”
The trigger is the mailing date, not the date the card lands in a mailbox and not the date a household opens it. A card that spends a week in transit, or sits unopened on a counter, uses up part of the 60 days without anyone noticing. A hypothetical shows the arithmetic: a card mailed on October 15 would see the old one deactivate on December 14, 60 days later. A card mailed on the very last day of the rollout, December 31, would put the old-card cutoff at March 1, 2027.
New Jersey counts from issue, then offers a longer activation window
New Jersey’s Department of Human Services announced on September 10 that chip cards are available statewide. The release says current cards expire 60 days after new cards are issued, and that cardholders have 90 days from receipt to activate the new ones.
Read side by side, the two figures leave a gap that the release, as read for this article, does not explain. A 90-day activation window is longer than a 60-day expiry on the old card. A household that uses its old card normally and waits to activate the new one could reach the expiry date first. The safer reading is that the shorter clock controls whenever the old card is the one being used at the register, and New Jersey households with questions can put that exact point to the department.
The same release reports 41,000 tap-to-pay transactions since the pilot began, a sign that the new cards are already in use at stores. That figure describes usage, not eligibility or timing, so it changes nothing about when an old card stops working. It does suggest that a household activating early is joining a system already running at the checkout counter, not a test.
Maryland shows the third way: one fixed date for everyone
Neither rolling clock applies in Maryland. That state’s Department of Human Services tells cardholders that magnetic-stripe cards will stop working on September 30, 2026, a single date for all households, and asks for a new PIN to be created during activation. Massachusetts, which called itself in a July 29 announcement the fourth state to roll out chip-and-tap EBT cards statewide, mailed cards to the rest of the state throughout August.
The result is a patchwork of rules that a family has to sort out card by card. A family with relatives in three states could be following a per-card clock, a fixed calendar date and a rolling statewide mailing at once, and the words “old card expires” mean something different in each.
Stolen benefits are not put back
The urgency around chip cards ties to theft. Virginia’s site states that benefits lost to skimming, cloning or other fraudulent methods cannot be replaced. New Jersey’s release says federal authorization and funding for replacing electronically stolen SNAP benefits ended in December 2024.
For a household on a tight grocery budget, the practical stakes are plain. A month’s benefits taken by a skimmer are gone, and the chip card is the tool states are using to make that less likely. Both states have built their timetables around retiring the magnetic-stripe card, so a household that keeps swiping it is relying on the technology the states are trying to replace.
What the two clocks mean for the kitchen table
For Virginia, the working rule is to treat the mailing of the new card as the start of a 60-day countdown, even though the mailing date is not always visible to the household. The state’s rollout runs through the end of the year, so cards will arrive in different weeks in different parts of the state. For New Jersey, the working rule is to activate the new card promptly rather than lean on the 90-day figure, since the old card is scheduled to expire after 60.
The primary texts for both states remain the New Jersey Department of Human Services release of September 10 and the Virginia Department of Social Services chip card site, and each is the place to confirm a household’s own dates.
Two states, one renewal calendar problem
The 60-day card rules in Virginia and New Jersey are separate from the SNAP recertification and reporting dates that run on their own schedules. A household can hold a working card and still miss a paperwork deadline.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer includes a renewal and reporting calendar, a renewal document checklist and 51 state packs for keeping those separate dates straight.
Compare SNAP renewal and reporting dates by state →
This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked against the cited state agency sources.
