How have TANF and SNAP participation rates changed by race from 2015 to 2025?
Executive summary
Across available federal reporting, the racial composition of SNAP participants has remained broadly stable from the mid-2010s through the early 2020s: White people constitute the largest single racial share (roughly mid-30s percent), Black people make up about a quarter, and Hispanic participants about mid-teens; total SNAP rolls rose during economic downturns and reached roughly 41 million in 2024 [1] [2] [3]. TANF’s caseload, by contrast, has been much smaller and has declined since the 1990s for all races; scholarly reviews describe racial differentials in TANF/AFDC receipt as relatively stable over time but do not provide a clean 2015→2025 race-by-race trend in the sources provided [4] [5].
1. SNAP’s racial shares: steady composition, growing totals
Federal analyses and advocacy summaries based on USDA demographic reports show that SNAP’s racial breakdown in recent years centers on White recipients as the plurality (approximately 35–37 percent), Black recipients at about 25–27 percent, and Hispanic recipients near 15–16 percent, with Asians and Native Americans representing much smaller shares and a notable share coded “race unknown” in some state reports [6] [1] [7]. Those percentage shares have been reported consistently across USDA-characteristics reports into 2023 and reiterated by analysts in 2024–2025, even as absolute participation rose and fell with the economy; the Economic Research Service emphasizes that SNAP participation expands during downturns and contracts during recoveries, so total numbers changed while racial shares stayed relatively stable [3] [8].
2. TANF: a shrunken, heterogeneous cash program with stable racial differentials
TANF (formerly AFDC) remains a much smaller cash-assistance program than SNAP and has seen a long-term caseload decline that began in the 1990s and continued thereafter; National Academies review finds that although absolute caseloads fell for all races, race/ethnic differentials in welfare receipt have been relatively stable over time [4]. Federal TANF reporting is decentralized—states run programs with block grants—and while the Administration for Children and Families publishes state-level TANF data and recipient characteristics, the provided sources do not supply a unified national 2015→2025 racial time series for TANF participation in the way USDA does for SNAP [5].
3. Interaction between SNAP and TANF: overlap and small cash share
Most SNAP households do not receive TANF cash assistance; multiple sources note that only a small share of SNAP households also receive TANF—estimates in recent reporting put that overlap in the low single digits nationally (e.g., 3–4 percent of SNAP households overall, and a slightly higher share among SNAP households with children) —which means changes in TANF policy or caseloads have limited direct effect on overall SNAP racial composition [1] [8]. SNAP’s role as an automatic stabilizer (rising with unemployment) explains much of the change in total SNAP rolls since 2015, while TANF’s strict work and time-limit rules have kept its caseload suppressed relative to earlier decades [3] [4].
4. What the sources document — and what they do not
The sources document consistent SNAP racial-share snapshots (mid-2010s through FY2023 reports) and national analyses of program function, but they do not provide a clean, single federal table that lists national SNAP and TANF participation rates for each racial group for every year from 2015 through 2025 in one place; some Census tools and state fact sheets give point-in-time rates (for example, a 2018 SNAP rate for Hispanic women cited in a Census interactive tool), while USDA and advocacy groups publish fiscal-year snapshots [9] [10] [8]. Therefore, a precise year‑by‑year numerical trendline by race for 2015–2025 cannot be reconstructed from the provided documents alone without combining multiple datasets and reconciling differences in definitions and reporting periods [9] [10].
5. Competing narratives and policy implications
Advocates stress the human impact of cuts and that SNAP reduces poverty and food insecurity, citing program reach (about 41 million in 2024) and demographic details to argue against restrictive changes [2] [8], while fact-checkers caution that graphics lacking context can mislead about citizenship or racial composition of recipients [7]. Policymakers and researchers must therefore weigh that racial composition has been relatively constant even as absolute rolls shifted with macroeconomic conditions, and recognize the evidentiary gap: robust, comparable annual race-by-race participation rates for TANF and SNAP across 2015–2025 require assembling USDA, ACF, and Census series and harmonizing race categories and reporting windows [3] [5] [9].