Has the percentage of Walmart employees on public assistance changed since 2010?

1. What the public record actually measures — and what it doesn’t

Congress’ nonpartisan watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), analyzed SNAP and Medicaid recipients in a subset of states and identified employers; that GAO work (and subsequent press coverage) shows Walmart was among the top four employers of recipients in each state studied, but it was not designed to produce a single national percentage of Walmart employees on public assistance over time ^{[1] [3]}. Independent academic and advocacy reports (for example, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and Americans for Tax Fairness) estimate costs or counts in specific places or years but do not offer a continuous national percent-of-workforce series from 2010 to today ^{[4] [5]}.

2. Why headline numbers can be misleading — scale vs. share

Walmart is the nation’s largest private employer, so raw counts of employees on assistance will be large even if the share of its workforce on programs is modest; that is exactly Walmart’s pushback in media coverage of the GAO findings, where the company emphasized its size and called the share “a small percentage” ^[3]. Several outlets — Mother Jones, Business Insider and others — relay GAO-state snapshots showing thousands of Walmart employees on SNAP or Medicaid in the analyzed states, but those snapshots don’t translate directly into a national percentage or reveal change since 2010 without comparable earlier baselines ^{[1] [3]}.

3. What researchers have found in specific studies

State or regional studies give more granular evidence: the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s California-focused report found Walmart workers in that state relied more on safety-net programs than other retail workers, illustrating localized higher reliance but not a nationwide trendline from 2010 onward ^[4]. Advocacy groups and coalitions have produced estimates of taxpayer costs tied to Walmart employees — for example, a 2017 Americans for Tax Fairness tally — but these are aggregate-cost estimates rather than workforce-percentage trends ^[5].

4. Where journalists and analysts look for trend data

To assess change over time you would need either comparable GAO-style employer analyses across multiple years or state program enrollment linked consistently to employer records; available reporting compiles employer snapshots (mostly around 2019–2020 GAO work) and company headcount data (Walmart’s employee totals available on corporate or data sites) but not the matched time series needed to compute an evolving percentage since 2010 ^{[1] [2]}. Public company filings publish headcount (e.g., 2.1 million employees reported in recent years), which is one half of the denominator, but available sources do not provide a reliable matched numerator (number of employees on assistance) across years to produce a trend ^{[6] [2]}.

5. Competing interpretations and explicit disputes

Advocates and academics interpret the GAO and regional studies as evidence that Walmart’s low wages shift costs onto taxpayers; reporting in outlets like In These Times, Jacobin and World Hunger News adopts that framing and cites studies linking Walmart employment to public-assistance reliance ^{[7] [8] [5]}. Walmart and some business commentators counter that the company’s large size explains high raw counts and that a “small percentage” of its workforce uses assistance — a direct rebuttal quoted in multiple outlets ^{[3] [9]}. Both lines of argument appear in the cited coverage; neither produces a national percent-over-time series in the provided sources.

6. Practical next steps to answer your original question

To determine whether the percentage of Walmart employees on public assistance changed since 2010 you would need matched employer-beneficiary data across multiple years (either GAO-style employer breakdowns repeated over time, state benefit records linked to employer IDs across states, or a reliable third-party longitudinal study). Available sources do not offer that matched, multi-year percentage series; current reporting provides snapshots, state-focused studies, and aggregate headcount data but not the continuous national percentage change since 2010 ^{[1] [4] [2]}.

7. Bottom line for readers

Available reporting shows repeated evidence that thousands of Walmart employees rely on SNAP and Medicaid in the states studied and that advocacy groups estimate substantial taxpayer costs tied to low-wage employment, while Walmart emphasizes context about its large workforce and describes the portion on assistance as small; however, none of the sources provided includes a verified national trend percentage of Walmart employees on public assistance from 2010 to today, so a definitive “changed since 2010” percentage cannot be established from these materials ^{[1] [5] [3] [4]}.