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Fact check: Which states have the highest and lowest employment rates among SNAP recipients in 2025 and why?
Executive Summary
Available materials in the packet do not provide a definitive list of which states had the highest and lowest employment rates among SNAP recipients in 2025; the supplied sources instead offer partial proxies — national-level earned-income shares, selective state snapshots, and policy shifts (not direct state-by-state employment rates). To answer “which states” requires state-level employment data that the provided documents either omit or place behind restricted access; the available evidence points to variation driven by state policy choices, ABAWD exemptions, and recent reinstated work requirements [1] [2] [3].
1. Why the direct answer is missing — the inconvenient data gap
None of the documents in the packet contain a clear table ranking states by employment rates among SNAP recipients for 2025; the most directly relevant item is a password-protected state-by-state SNAP statistics page that could contain those numbers but is inaccessible in this dataset. The absence means we cannot responsibly declare which states are highest or lowest based on the supplied materials. The framing documents emphasize administrative concerns — error rates, program integrity, and aggregate participation — rather than granular labor-force attachment at the state level, leaving a crucial evidence gap for the precise comparative claim [2] [4] [1].
2. National context: employment among SNAP households gives a partial picture
A national statistic in the packet shows that roughly 28% of SNAP households had earned income in FY2023, which is the closest direct indicator of workforce attachment available here but is not equivalent to an employment rate among individual SNAP recipients in 2025. That FY2023 figure helps set expectations: a substantial minority of SNAP households include earnings, suggesting meaningful heterogeneity across states and household types. Interpreting state rankings from this national average would be speculative without state-level breakdowns; the data imply variation but do not identify which states cluster above or below the national share [1].
3. Policy levers that can produce state-to-state differences
State policies shape employment outcomes for SNAP recipients through ABAWD waiver allocations, work requirement enforcement, and program administration. The packet includes FY2025 discretionary allocations for ABAWD exemptions and notes that enforcement of work requirements was scheduled to begin nationwide on November 1, 2025, a change likely to shift employment-related participation differentially across states. States granting more exemptions or using discretion to reduce sanctions will likely have different employment profiles among recipients than states enforcing stricter work mandates, creating policy-driven divergence in 2025 outcomes [5] [3].
4. Selected state-level snippets hint at variation but not ranking
Some state fact sheets in the packet offer partial glimpses. For example, a state-level fact sheet reported that 35% of SNAP participants in Alabama were in working families, a figure substantially above the national FY2023 household-earnings share and pointing to state heterogeneity. However, isolated items like that do not permit cross-state comparison across all 50 states and territories. The presence of such snapshots shows that state differences exist and are measurable, but the dataset lacks the comprehensive, comparable employment-rate series needed to identify the highest and lowest states definitively [6].
5. Administrative signals that matter: error rates and fiscal incentives
A separate analysis discusses the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s implications for federal-state responsibility and how states’ SNAP error rates will determine future state fiscal obligations; eight states faced no state match based on 2024 error rates. While error rates are an administrative metric distinct from recipient employment, they affect state budgets, compliance capacity, and the resources states can devote to employment services, eligibility review, and ABAWD management — all of which indirectly influence employment rates among recipients. This administrative context helps explain why different states might see divergent employment outcomes even absent direct employment data [4].
6. What’s needed to settle the question — and immediate next steps
To identify the highest- and lowest-employment-rate states among SNAP recipients in 2025 requires obtaining state-by-state data that disaggregate SNAP participation by employment status or earned-income presence for 2025, ideally from USDA Food and Nutrition Service or the Food Research & Action Center’s state profiles. The packet points to such resources (including the protected state-by-state statistics page) but does not provide access here; researchers should retrieve the underlying state tables referenced (or contact state agencies) and crosswalk them with ABAWD exemption and waiver data to understand policy effects. Absent those state-level series in this dataset, any definitive ranking would be speculative [2] [6] [5] [3].