With a special thanks to Victoria Negus at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute for her detailed contributions.

The second Trump administration entered with an aggressive agenda to reshape American life, creating ongoing uncertainty across many policy areas. Boston Indicators launched this Meeting the Moment series to help track these federal changes and analyze their local impact.

In a state as wealthy as Massachusetts, no one should go hungry. Yet even here, many families struggle to afford healthy food. For decades, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has helped close that gap. But the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) recently passed by Congress and signed by President Trump risks undercutting progress we have made in reducing food insecurity in Massachusetts. State leaders are working to backfill some of the cuts to SNAP in OBBB, but how much they can do remains uncertain. Cuts to Medicaid in the same law are likely to be much larger in dollar terms and will force the legislature to weigh tough tradeoffs.

This brief analyzes the local implications of the OBBB’s SNAP provisions. It begins by mapping current SNAP participation across Greater Boston’s cities and towns, identifying where food assistance plays the largest role. It then details the specific cuts and policy changes included in the new law and, where possible, estimates how many recipients in the region may lose benefits or face new barriers to accessing them. Key findings from this analysis include:

• State data obtained via a public records request from Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) suggest that roughly 9,600 legally present immigrants in Massachusetts could lose access to SNAP when the new eligibility rules take effect.
• Expanded Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWD) work requirements and narrowed exemptions, including for parents, could put at least 40,000 Greater Boston adults at risk of losing some or all of their benefits.
• ABAWD waivers tied to local economic conditions are sharply curtailed. States once had flexibility to designate towns or counties for waivers, but under OBBB, the Secretary of Agriculture decides how areas are defined, and only those with unemployment above 10 percent qualify. This change makes it much harder for struggling communities to get relief, even during a recession.
• Massachusetts will soon have to cover 75 percent of SNAP administrative costs, up from 50 percent. If this rule had applied in FY25, the state’s costs would have jumped by $58 million, to $175 million.
• Starting in federal fiscal year 2028, the U.S. government will no longer automatically cover 100 percent of SNAP benefits, instead covering a percentage (up to 100 percent), based on whether the state overpaid or underpaid benefits during the three years prior.

SNAP Participation in Greater Boston Pre-OBBB

As of July 2025, Greater Boston accounted for more than half of the Commonwealth’s SNAP caseload: 361,473 cases and 578,686 clients, or roughly 56 percent of the statewide client total. While SNAP recipients live in every corner of the region, participation rates vary widely by community.

The highest concentrations are found in cities like Lawrence and Brockton, where more than a third of all residents receive SNAP. In Lawrence’s 01840 ZIP Code, covering low-income neighborhoods just north of downtown, an estimated 63 percent of residents are SNAP clients, which is the highest share of any ZIP Code in the region.

By contrast, wealthier suburbs in places like MetroWest and the North and South Shores have far lower participation rates, often between 1 and 4 percent.

The table below lists the 10 Greater Boston cities with the highest SNAP participation rates. These numbers help illustrate both the scale of the program and its deep roots in working-class and immigrant communities across the region.

Summary of SNAP Cuts in OBBB

Language in the OBBB makes clear that some families will lose SNAP eligibility right away, even as many details remain to be set through the federal rulemaking process. One such provision is the stripping of SNAP from legally-present immigrants with thoroughly vetted humanitarian statuses including refugees given express permission to enter the U.S. and persons granted asylum; victims of human trafficking; battered immigrants as defined under the Violence Against Women’s Act, and certain humanitarian parolees. Many have suffered significant physical and psychological harm, and have historically been eligible under longstanding federal policy but are now categorically excluded. Eligibility remains only for lawful permanent residents (green-card holders), Cuban and Haitian entrants, and COFA citizens (people from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia). These cuts represent a sharp policy shift, and based on state data, may result in an end to SNAP benefits for around 9,600 immigrants in Massachusetts with legal status in the United States. Unfortunately, due to the OBBB, all future immigrants with humanitarian status—many of them fleeing persecution in their home countries—will not have access to these resources.

It’s important to clarify that undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for SNAP, despite political rhetoric that suggests otherwise. Even many categories of immigrants here legally were never eligible for SNAP, including those here on Temporary Protected Status. The groups affected by these new eligibility cuts are all in the country lawfully under programs previously recognized as qualifying for food assistance. While the range of potentially impacted residents is wide, based on settlement patterns and immigration trends, we nevertheless might expect affected individuals to be concentrated in cities such as Lawrence, Lynn, Brockton, Boston, and Lowell—larger cities with significant immigrant populations and high SNAP enrollment rates.

Currently, there are two tiers of SNAP work rules. The first, known as the general work requirements, apply to most adult recipients and generally require people to accept jobs they are offered. The second, much stricter tier applies to Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs). Under prior law, ABAWDs between the ages of 18 and 55 are required to work or participate in a training program for at least 20 hours per week, or 80 hours per month, unless they had an exemption such as a disability or were living with a child under 18. Crucially, looking for work does not count toward the ABAWDs requirement.

The OBBB significantly expands the reach of these stricter ABAWD rules. The age range now extends up to 65, and the parenting exemption is narrowed—only parents of children under 14 will now be exempt. Parents with children between the ages of 14 and 18 will now face the same rules as those without dependents. In addition, existing exemptions for veterans and homeless individuals have been eliminated entirely. The latter of these are not reliably counted in our data, but are noteworthy for their likelihood to include many adults and children in families. In all, these changes are expected to impact many SNAP recipients who are technically able-bodied but face barriers to stable employment, such as inconsistent work hours, caregiving obligations, or limited access to training programs.

Finally, the OBBB restricts which areas can receive ABAWD unemployment waivers. In the past, states could define an “area” as a town, city, or county when seeking a waiver, allowing residents in places with limited job opportunities to be exempt from work requirements. Now, unemployment must exceed 10 percent—regardless of whether there are sufficient jobs—and the Secretary of Agriculture has full discretion over how areas are defined. This change makes it less certain that federal officials will honor state assessments of need or grant waivers to communities facing serious hardship, and in practice it could push many more people into work requirements than the estimates provided in the next section suggest.

How SNAP Cuts Might Affect Greater Boston

To estimate the local impact of OBBB’s new eligibility restrictions, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), which includes information on SNAP household participation, composition, age, and work patterns. While the ACS is the best source available for regional analysis like this, it has limitations: It tends to undercount SNAP households, and its variables don’t align perfectly with the administrative rules used to determine eligibility. Still, it offers useful estimates for assessing the scope of likely effects.

With those caveats in mind, our analysis of ACS microdata suggests that these new rules are likely to subject at least 40,000 SNAP recipients in Greater Boston (or around 7 percent of the current total) to more restrictive work requirements. This includes 31,000 individuals in households who do not have children, and around 11,000 individuals in households with children who were previously exempted due to the age of their child (when broken out by group, rounding impacts our estimates). Though we do not do so here, were we to include everyone in the household who might lose some amount of SNAP benefits because a family member is newly exposed to work requirements, these numbers would likely be higher. It’s worth emphasizing however that this does not mean that all these adults will immediately lose eligibility for SNAP, as many will be able to demonstrate they are working or reveal an exemption that we are simply unable to capture here. Facing every group however, is the added administrative burden of finding and filing this paperwork. This extra hurdle may well discourage a significant portion of these otherwise eligible recipients from pursuing their benefits.

These changes affect every racial and ethnic group, but the largest impact in raw numbers will be among White SNAP recipients, where about 18,000 individuals could now be exposed to the ABAWD work requirements, growing by about 55 percent. This number includes both individuals in households without dependents, and those in households with dependents. For the White population this increase is largely due to the region’s larger and older White population, which is subject to the stricter rules as the eligible age range expands to 64.

The impact is similar for households with children. Under OBBB, the parenting exemption is narrowed, with only those caring for children under 14 exempt from work rules, down from under 18 previously. At the same time, the upper age limit for adults subject to work requirements has been raised from 54 to 64. The loss of the parenting exemption will likely hit Latino households the hardest, adding around 5,000 adults who would previously have been exempted. In total, we expect the loss of parenting exemptions to affect about 11,000 adults in Greater Boston households. Aside from White and Latino households—which are likely to grow due to age and parenting exposure respectively—losses will be more evenly split between households with and without dependents among most other groups.

While precise outcomes will depend on how the USDA implements these changes through the rulemaking process and Massachusetts’ response, these rough estimates suggest that tens of thousands of local residents could face new barriers to receiving food assistance in the coming months and years.

SNAP Costs Shift onto States

In addition to tightening eligibility rules, OBBB drives a major shift in how SNAP is financed by offloading significant costs from the federal ledger onto state governments. These fiscal changes don’t take effect immediately, but they will reshape state budgets for years to come. For states like Massachusetts that have balanced budget requirements, the need to shoulder these higher SNAP costs effectively forces cuts elsewhere in the budget.

The cost share provisions roll out in two parts: The first, scheduled for the start of Federal Fiscal Year 2027 (FFY27), reduces the federal match for SNAP administrative costs. Today, the federal government covers 50 percent of the cost of determining eligibility, processing cases, and managing benefits. Under OBBB, that match will drop to 25 percent, requiring states to cover 75 percent—a 50 percent increase over current rates. For Massachusetts’ fiscal year 2025, this would have translated to an increase of about $58 million, raising the state’s total SNAP administrative costs to approximately $175 million.¹

The second provision, which is far more costly to the state, shifts responsibility for SNAP benefit payments themselves. Currently, the federal government pays 100 percent of those costs. Starting in FFY28, that will change. Under a new formula, a state’s share of SNAP benefit costs will be based on its “payment error rate,” calculated as the share of benefits in a small sample of cases that are either overpaid or underpaid due to administrative mistakes (and it’s important to note, error rates are very rarely a consequence of fraud). States with error rates below 6 percent in each federal fiscal year (starting with FFY25 or FFY26) will maintain full federal coverage. But the higher the error rate in a specific federal fiscal year, the more a state will be expected to pay in the following two years, up to a maximum of 15 percent of total benefit costs for states with error rates at or above 10 percent. Based on the FFY23 error rate of 9.86 percent in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth would’ve been forced to find an additional $260 million for SNAP benefits.

Massachusetts’ higher SNAP error rate in FFY24 stemmed in part from underinvestment in administration. When states spend more, lowering caseloads per worker and making sure staff can respond to recipient questions, error rates typically fall. Recent state budgets have increased funding for the Department of Transitional Assistance and added caseworkers, so FFY25 and FFY26 rates should improve. But the federal process recalculates the payment error rate every federal fiscal year, setting the state’s cost-share three federal fiscal years later. That means a single bad year can lock states into a costly cycle where SNAP grows more expensive even as it serves fewer households.

Curiously, in a specific carve-out to get Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote to pass the OBBB, the start of this entire process is delayed for states if their error rate when multiplied by 1.5 is greater than 20 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alaska would fit these criteria.

Conclusion

By imposing stricter work requirements on adults, with narrowed parenting and other exemptions, and eliminating eligibility for many immigrants despite their acknowledged legal status, the OBBB is fundamentally altering SNAP’s focus. Instead of working to ensure families are fed and have access to the food they need, the OBBB turns SNAP into a paper chase for families and states. The increased focus on bureaucracy is a burden not only on families who may or may not be able to easily prove their compliance with new rules, but also on states, which are punished for over- or under-payment mistakes. In Greater Boston alone, tens of thousands of residents now stand one paperwork error or missed shift away from losing some or all of their basic food assistance.

_{1. Based on MLRI budget analysis.}