Food stamps don't buy enough food anymore. That's not a slogan. It's the finding of a county-by-county study updated this week.

The Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, compared the top food stamp benefit with what a modestly priced meal actually costs in every county in America. In 3,144 counties, the benefit covered the meal in just 27. That's a shortfall in 99% of counties.

The Arkansas Times pulled out the local number: in Pulaski County, a modestly priced meal costs 22% more than SNAP pays.

The gap has a fix, and the government had used it before. Then Arkansas's Republicans in Congress voted to take it away.

What a meal costs, and what SNAP pays

Here is the math, from Urban's latest numbers:

• A modestly priced meal cost $3.57 in the last three months of 2025.
• For most of 2025, the top food stamp benefit in the lower 48 states worked out to $2.84 a meal. After a cost-of-living bump in October, it was $2.90.
• Against the benefit for most of the year, the meal cost 25% more nationally. Even after the October bump, it cost 23% more.
• Over a month, that left each person on the top benefit $66.96 short.

In some cities, the Arkansas Times reported, the meal costs 80% more than the benefit.

That gap is getting bigger, not smaller. When Urban ran the same study a year earlier, using prices from the end of 2024, the gap was 20% and the monthly shortfall was $53.01. Measured the same way, after the yearly benefit bump, it was 23% at the end of 2025. And the Times notes that food prices are still climbing, up 2.5% from a year ago, according to the USDA.

This matters more than it sounds: nearly 40% of people on SNAP get the top benefit, according to Urban.

The fix that worked

SNAP benefits are set by the Thrifty Food Plan, the USDA's official standard for what a healthy, low-cost diet costs.

In 2021, the USDA took a fresh look at that plan. It was the first real update since 1975. According to Urban's analysis, the update:

• raised SNAP benefits by 21%
• cut the share of counties where a meal cost more than the benefit from 96% to 21%
• kept 2.9 million people out of poverty

So the gap is not some law of nature. The last time the government took a hard look at what food costs, it almost closed it. The law requires another of those reviews every five years. The next one is due in 2027.

What Arkansas's Republicans voted for

Trump's budget bill, which Republicans passed in July 2025, changed that. Among its SNAP changes, it requires that any future update to the Thrifty Food Plan be cost neutral. In plain words: benefits can still rise with inflation, but the 2027 review can't raise them any further, even if the data show families need more.

The Urban Institute put it this way, in a passage the Arkansas Times quoted:

"Given that the Thrifty Food Plan is the primary mechanism used to raise SNAP benefits, enforcing cost neutrality will make it harder to improve benefit adequacy in the future."

In other words, the 2021 fix can't be repeated. The tool that cut the gap from 96% of counties to 21% has been taken away.

Every Arkansas Republican on this site voted for that.

• In the House, on July 3, 2025, Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman all voted "Aye" on the final version of the bill.
• In the Senate, on July 1, 2025, Tom Cotton voted yes on a bill that tied 50 to 50. Vice President Vance broke the tie. Any one Republican who switched would have sunk it. Cotton didn't.

The cost-neutral rule was not the only hit to food stamps in that bill. The Congressional Budget Office scored the law as cutting food assistance by nearly $187 billion over ten years, with new work rules, cuts to who qualifies, and a new bill for the states. We've written about how Republicans dumped billions in food stamp costs on the states, and about the 4 million fewer Americans now on food stamps.

In the most food-insecure state in America

Arkansas is the last place that can absorb this.

The USDA ranked Arkansas the most food-insecure state in the country in each of its last three reports, with 19.4% of households short of food over 2022 to 2024. After that, the Arkansas Times reported, the USDA stopped releasing the list. Arkansas's own researchers put the number higher. A University of Arkansas and UAMS survey released in February found 28.8% of adult Arkansans food insecure, about 688,000 people.

So in the state where the most people already can't afford enough food, the benefit meant to fill that gap is falling further behind each year. And its representatives voted to keep the government from catching it up.

The state is about to take a hit of its own, too. Arkansas now has to pay a bigger share of running the program, and starting in 2027 it will owe part of the benefits themselves. We laid out those numbers when a statewide survey found 37% of Arkansans saying they don't have enough food, along with how Governor Sarah Sanders praised the bill.

The man on the food committee

Rick Crawford sits on the House Agriculture Committee, the committee that writes food stamp policy. Earlier this year he wrote a Farm Bill amendment letting food stamp shoppers buy a hot rotisserie chicken. As we reported, that change adds no money to anyone's benefit, but the chicken industry loved it.

A hot chicken doesn't help much when the benefit runs out before the month does. On the vote that decided whether food stamps could ever be raised to match the cost of food, Crawford voted for the limit.

This isn't the first time we've tallied what the delegation's votes cost the state. We've walked through what Arkansas's Republicans in Congress are costing you before. Food is the clearest line on the bill.

What the record shows

In all but 27 of America's 3,144 counties, the top food stamp benefit no longer covers a modestly priced meal. The gap ran 25% nationwide for most of 2025 and 22% in Pulaski County, and at the end of the year it was 23%, up from 20% a year earlier. Tom Cotton, Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman all voted for Trump's budget bill, which requires future updates to the food stamp formula to be cost neutral. That shuts off the same kind of update that, in 2021, cut the share of counties with a gap from 96% to 21%. They cast those votes for Arkansas, the state the USDA ranked the most food-insecure in the country three reports running.

Source

SNAP benefits not covering the cost of a modestly priced meal, thanks to One Big Beautiful Bill — Byron Tate, Arkansas Times, October 30, 2026