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By Jasmine Laws
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Improper Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments reached more than $10 billion in the U.S. last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said, highlighting the scale of payment errors as the Trump administration tries to clamp down on the issue.
The USDA said on Wednesday that the national SNAP payment error rate stood at 10.62 percent in Fiscal Year 2025. The figure includes overpayments to ineligible households or those receiving too much aid, as well as underpayments to those receiving too little.
It comes as the Trump administration has been implementing major changes to the program, which serves roughly 42 million low‑income Americans, particularly over concerns regarding fraud, eligibility requirements and improper payments. It is part of the administration's wider efforts to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse" in public assistance programs.
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While the 2025 rate marked a slight improvement from 10.93 percent in Fiscal Year 2024, the USDA emphasized that the decline was only “modest" and that error levels remain well above the 6 percent threshold set by Congress. Previous USDA data shows that the payment error rates are down from 11.68 percent in Fiscal Year 2023.
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What Is Trump Administration Doing About Improper SNAP Payments?
As part of his sweeping tax package, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, President Donald Trump brought in new guardrails for improper SNAP payments, meaning that states with error rates at or above the 6 percent threshold will be responsible for covering 5 percent, 10 percent or 15 percent of their states' benefits.
The higher their payment error rate, the higher the percentage of SNAP benefits they will have to cover. The 2025 fiscal year is also the first that could be used to calculate those percentages, the USDA said on Wednesday, and the measure will take effect October 1, 2027.
States exceeding the threshold must also submit corrective action plans detailing how they will reduce errors, and they may face additional financial penalties.
The USDA has described the changes as “historic action” to curb SNAP waste, while administration officials argue that shifting financial risk to states will incentivize more accurate eligibility determinations and benefit calculations.
Supporters say the reforms are necessary to address persistent inefficiencies, while critics warn they could strain state budgets and lead to reduced access to food assistance if states scale back participation or tighten eligibility.
Payment errors happen as the result of "both administrative error and client error," Colleen Heflin, a professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, told Newsweek.
"Administrative error can include mis-keying in information, benefit calculation errors, and often results from the lack of access to accurate earnings data," she said, adding that client errors can occur from "misunderstanding the questions and process, misreporting income, having variable hours and wages, and household members that move in and out, as well as changes in utilities and housing costs that may vary over the year."
States With Highest Payment Error Rates
According to data from the USDA, the state with the highest payment error rate in Fiscal Year 2025 was Alaska, at 23.15 percent, followed by New Mexico (16.81 percent), Delaware (16 percent), Georgia (15.21 percent), Oregon (14.14 percent) and Illinois (14.67 percent).
Compared to 2024 data, many of the same states had the highest payment error rates the year prior. Alaska still had the highest payment error rate—significantly driven by overpayments rather than underpayments—at 24.66 percent. New Mexico's rate was not as high in 2024, when it was 14.61 percent, which was also the case for Oregon, Delaware and Illinois.
Georgia had a higher payment error rate in Fiscal Year 2024 at 15.65 percent, and Florida was among the highest-ranking states for improper payments at 15.13 percent.
On the other end of the spectrum, South Dakota has consistently had the lowest payment error rate—around 3 percent in Fiscal Year 2024 and around 2 percent in Fiscal Year 2025.
South Dakota has had very low payment error rates since 2003, Heflin said, though she added that the state also has "below average access to SNAP as measured by another SNAP performance metric, the Program Access Index."
"This suggests that they are making a tradeoff between SNAP accuracy and access," she said.
Julia Wolfson, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek that it's important to note that error rates are "not equivalent to fraud" and occur for a variety of reasons, including understaffing, spikes in caseloads, IT systems issues and many others.
Concern Around Payment Error Rate Calculations
Heflin told Newsweek that payment error rates are calculated based on a "review of a sample of active SNAP cases included in state quality control data," which she added was "problematic because the sample size is quite low, which results in large confidence intervals."
She said that annual sample sizes for each state can vary from 300 to 1,020, and the official payment error rate "has a confidence interval around it, which captures the range of values that the true [payment error rate] is 95 percent certain to fall within."
For example, in Alaska, the 2023, the official payment error rate was 60.37, she said, but the confidence interval ranged from 52.3 to 68.4.
She said that the states with the highest payment error rates in Fiscal Year 2025 all had small changes in their error rates compared to previous years' data that is "likely within the confidence interval."
"States are trying new administrative processes to address [payment error rates] and there is likely some transition time and costs of doing so," Heflin said.
"It also should not be forgotten that SNAP benefit calculations were a mess during the government shutdown last fall and states may have had error rates in November as federal guidance and court orders changed what size of SNAP benefits states were authorized or required to issue," she added.
What Happens Next
At this stage, it is difficult to know whether the Trump administration's anti-waste efforts are working. On one hand, the decline from 10.93 percent in Fiscal Year 2024 to 10.62 percent in Fiscal Year 2025 suggests some improvement. On the other, the continued scale of improper payments, still exceeding $10 billion, indicates that meaningful reductions have yet to materialize.
Moreover, only a small number of states currently meet the federal standard of payment error rates below 6 percent—in Fiscal Year 2025 data, it was less than 10 states.
Heflin said that it is important to note that "since a large portion of these errors are outside the control of the agencies [because they have to work with the information that clients provide], it will be difficult to bring down these errors without needlessly burdening all SNAP recipients."
She said that since SNAP is designed to provide the highest benefit levels to the poorest households, the households facing the "most administrative scrutiny will be the most needy." Research has shown that "increasing the administrative burden often results in households not accessing the benefits that they need," she added.
Wolfson also said she was "skeptical that the new financial penalties tied to error rates will bring down the payment errors because if error rates are stemming from staffing shortages and/or outdated IT systems, the policies in H.R.1, particularly the higher administrative cost sharing states will have to do, actually reduce the amount of money states will have to address those issues."
Instead, what the Trump administration could do is "create a modern income verification system that states could access for free to check earnings and prevent misreporting issues by clients," Heflin said.
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