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Fact check: Which states have the highest and lowest employment rates among food stamp recipients in 2024?
Executive Summary
The available materials do not provide a definitive answer to which states had the highest and lowest employment rates among SNAP (food stamp) recipients in 2024; the datasets and reports supplied report SNAP participation shares or limited measures like the share of participants in working families, not state-level employment rates for recipients. Multiple sources consistently identify states with the highest and lowest SNAP participation rates in FY2024 — New Mexico and the District of Columbia among the highest and Utah among the lowest — but those participation percentages are distinct from an employment rate measure and cannot be used to answer the original question about recipients’ employment without additional, state-level employment-by-recipient data [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What claimants said and what the documents actually contain — a reality check that matters
Analyses in the packet make two different types of claims: one set reports percent of state populations receiving SNAP in FY2024 or nearby years, while another provides a small set of employment-related stats limited to particular states or family types. The claim that New Mexico, DC, Oregon, and West Virginia top SNAP use while Utah, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and North Dakota are lowest is supported by participation-rate data across multiple summaries, but those are participation rates — not the employment rates of recipients [1] [2] [3]. A separate dataset points out that Alabama’s SNAP caseload includes a high share in working families (35%), but that is a state-specific descriptive snapshot and not a national ranking of employment among recipients [4]. The documents do not contain a systematic, state-by-state measure of the fraction of SNAP recipients who are employed in 2024.
2. Participation figures often get misinterpreted as employment facts — why that matters for any policy reading
Participation rates measure the share of a state’s population receiving benefits and are influenced by poverty, eligibility rules, outreach, and economic conditions; they do not reveal recipients’ employment status. The packet includes consistent participation rankings — New Mexico and DC feature near the top, Utah near the bottom — but draws no direct line to employment rates. Researchers and advocates sometimes use auxiliary measures like “share in working families” as a proxy for work participation, but those are not equivalent to direct employment rates of SNAP recipients and are available only in limited state reports here [1] [4]. Treating participation percentages as employment rates risks misleading conclusions about labor-force attachment and the effectiveness of work requirements.
3. Who ranks highest and lowest by participation in the available 2024 data — a clear, replicable pattern
Across the materials, New Mexico appears consistently among the highest-participation states (figures reported around 21–22.9% in different summaries), the District of Columbia is similarly high (about 21.4% in one account), and states such as Oregon and West Virginia also rank near the top in some reports. At the lower end, Utah is repeatedly shown with the smallest share of its population on SNAP (roughly 4.6–4.8%), followed by New Hampshire, Wyoming, and North Dakota in various datasets. These participation figures come from USDA or synthesis pieces dated between mid-2023 and mid-2025 in the packet and are consistent across independent summaries, but again they document participation prevalence, not recipients’ employment [1] [2] [3].
4. What the evidence says about work requirements and employment outcomes — context often omitted
A targeted study in the collection examined the labor-market effects of food assistance work requirements and found no statistically significant discontinuity in labor outcomes at an age cutoff for ABAWD rules, suggesting that imposing or relaxing those requirements may not produce large changes in measured employment for the affected groups. Another piece discusses the “SNAP gap” — the difference between eligibility and participation — and documents state-by-state variation in participation among low-income working people, but it does not provide a clear state-level employment rate for recipients in 2024. These complementary findings indicate that policy levers, eligibility, and outreach drive participation numbers, while measured employment responses to program rules are not straightforward in the studies provided [5] [6].
5. What’s missing and the path to a direct answer — data needs and next steps
To answer the original question definitively would require a state-by-state table giving the percentage of SNAP recipients who were employed in 2024, ideally from a single, comparable source such as state administrative SNAP files linked to employment data or the Census Bureau/USDA tabulations that explicitly break down recipients by employment status. The current packet