How many SNAP recipients claimed disability exemptions in 2022 and 2023?

1. Why the headline number is missing: reporting gaps and what exists instead

The primary USDA household-characteristics reports for fiscal 2022 and 2023 provide detailed breakdowns of SNAP households—showing shares of households that include children, elderly members, or nonelderly individuals with disabilities—and benefit distributions, but they stop short of reporting a discrete count of recipients who formally claimed a disability exemption from work requirements in each year. The 2022 report covers household characteristics but does not enumerate exemption claims, and the 2023 report similarly provides prevalence metrics (for example, about 10% of nonelderly participants identified as having a disability) without converting that into an exemption-claim figure ^{[4] [1] [5]}. The difference matters: identifying as disabled on survey or administrative records is not the same administrative action as claiming a statutory exemption, and USDA reporting separates household composition statistics from state-level exemption tracking.

2. How advocates and analysts frame the same data differently

Advocacy and policy analyses use the USDA prevalence figures to illustrate program vulnerability but interpret them toward different policy points. One set of analyses emphasizes that many people who meet disability criteria may face procedural hurdles proving exemption eligibility—medical documentation, caseworker discretion, and administrative barriers—thereby arguing that changes to work-related rules would disproportionately harm people with disabilities ^{[6] [2]}. Another analysis uses the 10% prevalence estimate as a scale indicator (translating to roughly 4 million people) to show the population potentially affected by policy shifts, but it stops short of claiming all those people formally claimed exemptions in 2022 or 2023 ^{[1] [3]}. Both strands rely on the same USDA-based prevalence data but diverge when inferring how many completed exemption paperwork.

3. What the discretionary-exemption tables actually tell us—and what they do not

Separate USDA materials and state reporting requirements exist for discretionary exemptions for able-bodied adults without dependents, including FY2023 allocation tables, but those documents list state allocations and reporting obligations rather than month-by-month usage of disability exemptions. The fiscal-year allocation table clarifies that states must track and report discretionary exemptions monthly on a quarterly basis, yet the publicized table for FY2023 does not show actual usage totals and explicitly notes many states did not need to use discretionary slots ^[7]. This underscores a recurring theme across the sources: administrative categories and allocated slots are documented, but aggregated counts of disability exemption claims across all states and months are not published in a consolidated form in the cited reports.

4. Reconstructing an approximate scale—and the limits of that reconstruction

Multiple sources converge on a rough magnitude: around 10% of nonelderly SNAP participants reported having a disability in 2023, which analysts have translated to an approximate count of 4 million people based on national participation totals ^{[2] [1]}. This provides a useful upper-bound sense of the population for whom disability status is relevant, but it cannot be equated precisely with the number who claimed or were granted formal exemptions from work requirements in 2022 or 2023. The USDA tables supply household-level distributions and benefit shares—showing that households with elderly or disabled members received a disproportionate share of benefits—but they do not track the specific administrative action “exemption claimed” across all states and months ^{[5] [4]}.

5. Where to look next if you need an authoritative count

To obtain a firm count of disability exemption claims in 2022 and 2023, the next step is obtaining state-level administrative reports or USDA consolidated tables that explicitly tabulate exemption approvals and monthly usage, because current high-level reports and policy analyses provided here do not publish that aggregate. The materials note that states report discretionary-exemption usage quarterly and that program rules require tracking, so an aggregation effort—either by USDA in a different dataset or by compiling state quarterly reports—would be the authoritative path to a definitive number ^{[7] [4]}. In the absence of that compiled table in the cited documents, any single-number claim about “how many claimed disability exemptions” would exceed what the existing sources substantiate.

6. What to keep in mind about agendas and interpretation

Sources emphasizing harms from proposed SNAP rule changes foreground administrative barriers and the practical gap between disability prevalence and exemption uptake, aiming to shape policy debates about protections for people with disabilities; their agenda is protective, using prevalence to illustrate risk ^{[6] [2]}. USDA household-characteristics reports are descriptive and neutral in intent but constrained by reporting categories that do not align perfectly with policy-action counts ^{[4] [5]}. Readers seeking a singular numeric answer should treat prevalence-based extrapolations (the ~10% / ~4 million figure) as contextual approximations, not verified counts of exemption claims, and pursue state administrative data or an explicit USDA aggregate for verification ^{[1] [3]}.