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Abstract
Excerpts: As the cornerstone of the nation’s nutrition safety net, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides monthly benefits to households with low incomes to reduce food insecurity and improve health and well-being. To help SNAP participants maintain their food purchasing power, policymakers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) periodically realign benefits to account for inflation and support households through unexpected and unpredictable hardships. From 2020 to 2023, many households received additional benefit allotments in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency. Additionally, at the start of FY 2022, benefits increased due to a reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP). FNS periodically funds studies of SNAP participants’ benefit redemption patterns, including the average number and dollar amount of transactions made with SNAP benefits in a month, the types of retailers at which participants redeem their benefits, and the number of days or weeks that elapse before participants redeem most of their monthly benefit. Conducting the study immediately following a substantial increase in benefit amounts or benefit distribution provides a unique opportunity to examine how participants’ redemption patterns change in response to the benefit increase. This study of fiscal year (FY) 2022 benefit redemption patterns provides an opportunity to examine redemption patterns in a year when nearly all participants received a higher benefit than in previous years. In addition, households could redeem benefits online, an option that was not available in FY 2017, which was the focus of the most recent study of benefit redemption patterns (Castner et al. 2020).