(NEXSTAR) – States have two years to dramatically reduce mistakes in administering food aid or risk losing funding.
The Trump administration has told states if they don’t get their error rates under control by the 2028 fiscal year, they’ll lose partial federal funding for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps). The target is an error rate less than 6%.
In reality, the majority of states are nowhere near that benchmark. Nationally, the average error rate — which combines overpayments and underpayments — was 11% in the 2024 fiscal year. (The Food and Nutrition Service had not posted 2025 data at publication time.)
Some states are far further from the goal. Alaska made errors in 25% of SNAP payments, according to federal data. If that sounds bad, it’s a big improvement from 2023, when the state’s error rate was 60%.
The state’s error rate is so high, the Department of Health said, because it has been prioritizing keeping food assistance going, even when some documentation was missing.
Most of Alaska’s errors in 2024 were overpayments. Other jurisdictions with high rates of overpayment are Washington, D.C. (13.6%), Georgia (13.6%), Florida (13.1%), New Mexico (13.1%) and Massachusetts (13%).
Underpayments are less frequent, with most states underpaying only 1% or 2% of the time. The most underpayments were in Maryland (4.8%), D.C. (3.8%) and New Hampshire (3%).
See the error rates for every state in the interactive map below.
The government shutdown in late 2025 made the situation even more complicated for states trying to crack down on mistakes. When federal money dried up, many states tapped into their own emergency funds to keep food aid flowing or issue partial benefits for November.
Once the government reopened, it wasn’t clear how a messy month would be counted against them when it comes to error rates.
“By issuing multiple benefits in a month, it messes with the system. It messes with the sampling methods for quality control,” Chloe Green, assistant director of policy at the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA), told The Hill in November.
“If every case you have in November is an error, you can’t even catch up in the rest of the year to lower your error rate. In addition to payment error rates, there’s also a big concern around timeliness. States are also measured for their application processing timeliness,” Green said.
Nexstar asked the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services if partial payments or delayed payments during the 2025 government shutdown would count toward states’ error rates, but the agency wasn’t able to answer by publication time.
If a state is unable to get its error rate below the 6% threshold in time, it will need to cover between 5% and 15% of the cost of SNAP benefits. While SNAP is administered locally, the benefits come from federal dollars.
Those with higher error rates will generally have to pay more, but states with especially high mistake rates will have more time — as late as 2030 — to comply.
As a result of the cost shift, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that some states will end up reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits for about 300,000 people.