By Staff Reporter
ALBANY — New York finished building its universal school meal program last year. Now the federal ground under it is moving, and Western New York is one of the places it is moving fastest.
Between July 2025 and July 2026, the number of people receiving SNAP food benefits in Erie County fell from 140,550 to 126,714, a drop of 13,836 people, or 9.8 percent, according to monthly caseload data the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance publishes on the state’s open data portal. Niagara County fell 9.9 percent, from 26,934 to 24,276. Across the eight counties of Western New York, the SNAP rolls shrank by 20,909 people, or 9.6 percent, in a single year.
That matters for more than grocery budgets. SNAP enrollment is one of the main ways schools prove how many of their students are poor, and that proof decides how much Washington pays for every breakfast and lunch served. When fewer families are on SNAP, the federal check shrinks, and under the law Albany passed in 2025, the state is the one that has to cover the difference.
State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli laid out that risk in an Oct. 15 report, “Let’s Do Lunch: New York’s School Meal Expansion,” which found that New York had more than 1.9 million students in the school lunch program as of May, the third-highest total in the nation, and that the federal changes enacted in 2025 “may decrease the number of students receiving support and increase state costs.”
“Hunger should never prevent children from learning in school. The universal school meal program is a great success in New York, but it depends on continued partnership between the state and the federal government,” Mr. DiNapoli said. “Changing the law to make it harder to qualify for benefits not only hurts New York’s children, but could also increase state costs to maintain this essential program.”
How a free lunch gets paid for
Every school lunch in New York now costs a family nothing. It still costs the government $4.8199, the reimbursement rate the State Education Department set for the 2026-27 school year, according to a table in the comptroller’s report. Who pays that $4.82 depends on the child.
For a student who qualifies for a free meal, the federal government pays $4.76 and the state adds about six cents. For a student who would otherwise pay full price, Washington pays just 45 cents, and the state pays the remaining $4.3699.
Most schools do not sort students one by one. They use the federal Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, which lets a school or district serve free meals to everyone based on its “identified student percentage,” the share of students certified directly through programs such as SNAP, TANF and Medicaid. Under federal rules cited in the report, a school multiplies that percentage by 1.6 to get the share of its meals reimbursed at the free rate. A school at 62.5 percent or higher is reimbursed at the free rate for every meal; below that, it gets a blend.
The 2023 federal rule change that lowered the CEP entry threshold from 40 percent to 25 percent, combined with a state subsidy that topped up CEP schools, pushed New York’s CEP participation from 3,051 schools in the 2022-23 school year to 4,325 schools covering 2.4 million students in 2024-25, according to the report. By the 2025-26 school year, 90 percent of students were already getting free meals. The fiscal 2026 state budget closed the gap by requiring every school in the federal program to serve free meals to all students, added $160 million to subsidize it and required eligible schools to join CEP to “maximize federal reimbursement.”
Where the risk lands
The weak point is the identified student percentage. It is built from benefit rolls, and the 2025 federal law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, was written to shrink those rolls. The comptroller’s report says the law restricts SNAP and Medicaid eligibility for certain legally present immigrants, expands work requirements and makes some Medicaid recipients renew more often.
“Because SNAP and Medicaid enrollment are used to determine eligibility for CEP, declines in participation could reduce the number of students who are eligible for free school meals, altering reimbursement rates for the state,” the comptroller’s office wrote.
Statewide, the decline is already visible. The open data show SNAP enrollment fell from 2,940,513 people in July 2025 to 2,667,525 in July 2026, a drop of 272,988, which matches the “nearly 273,000” figure in the report. Outside New York City, the drop was 10.2 percent, steeper than the city’s 8.7 percent.
Western New York tracks the upstate trend:
- Erie County: 140,550 people in July 2025, 126,714 in July 2026 (down 9.8 percent). Households fell from 78,178 to 70,829, and monthly benefits from $27.8 million to $25.0 million.
- Niagara County: 26,934 to 24,276 (down 9.9 percent).
- Chautauqua County: 23,304 to 21,076 (down 9.6 percent).
- Cattaraugus County: 10,459 to 9,609 (down 8.1 percent).
- All eight WNY counties (with Allegany, Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming): 218,635 to 197,726 (down 9.6 percent).
Not every one of those people is a school-age child, and a smaller SNAP caseload can partly reflect families whose incomes rose. The data do not separate the two. But the comptroller’s report points to national figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimating that 1.5 million fewer children were receiving SNAP across 28 states between July 2025 and June 2026.
What a few points cost
Because of the 1.6 multiplier, small changes in a school’s identified percentage move a lot of money. A Buffalo Chronicle calculation using the state’s published reimbursement rates shows how.
Take a hypothetical district that serves 2 million lunches a year and has an identified student percentage of 50 percent. It is reimbursed at the free rate for 80 percent of its meals. If its percentage fell to 45 percent, roughly in line with the 10 percent drop in local SNAP rolls, only 72 percent of meals would qualify for the free rate. That shifts 160,000 lunches from the $4.76 federal rate to the 45-cent federal rate. Under New York’s universal meals law, the state’s paid-meal subsidy covers the gap, about $4.31 a meal, or roughly $690,000 a year for that one district’s lunches alone, before breakfast.
Federal rules let CEP schools lock in an identified percentage for up to four years, so many districts will not feel the change right away. The decline catches up with them when they next recalculate.
The comptroller also flagged a second, larger threat: proposals to raise the CEP qualifying rate from 25 percent to 60 percent. A version of that idea appeared on a list of savings options circulated as Congress drafted the 2025 law, with an estimated federal savings of $3 billion over 10 years, according to the report. It was not enacted, but the report warns that it “could result in a large number of schools in New York no longer qualifying for CEP.”
In federal fiscal year 2025, New York received more than $1.1 billion in federal school meal funding, the report says.
What the comptroller’s office says
The comptroller’s office has not put a dollar figure on that risk. Asked whether it had estimated how much more the state could pay each year if identified student percentages fell by a given amount, Matt Ryan, a deputy press secretary for Mr. DiNapoli, said in an email to The Buffalo Chronicle, “We did not do an estimate of what a given decline in identified student percent would cost the state.”
Asked for a breakdown of Western New York schools near the 62.5 percent line, Mr. Ryan pointed to the State Education Department. “A breakdown of schools in the state and their estimated ISP can be found here,” he said, referring to the department’s Community Eligibility Provision page. That page posts a CEP notification report on school food authorities and their potential identified student percentages, which the department says was created using proxy data and “does not fully reflect the number of identified students.”
Asked what districts should do now, while they can still lock in a current identified student percentage, Mr. Ryan put the emphasis on keeping eligible families enrolled. “It is important for the state and for counties to ensure that every New Yorker that is eligible continues to receive benefits, through assisting recipients with applications, renewals, and providing other required information necessary to maintain benefits,” he said.
The promise Albany made
When Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed for universal meals in 2025, she framed the state program as a shield against federal cuts.
“I’m fighting to make school meals free for every student in New York — giving every young person the nourishment they need to thrive in the classroom and putting money back in families’ pockets,” Ms. Hochul said in March 2025. “As the federal government takes a hammer to vital food assistance programs, we’re stepping up to the plate by filling the plates of those who need it most.”
The coalition behind that push included the state teachers union and farm groups. “School meals are more than just a lifeline for families facing food insecurity—they are a fundamental investment in the health, well-being, and success of every child in our state,” Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers, said at the time.
“For many schoolchildren in New York, the meals they eat at school can sometimes be the only meals they eat,” said David Fisher, president of the New York Farm Bureau, whose members benefit from a state incentive for schools that spend at least 30 percent of lunch budgets on New York-grown food.
Hunger Solutions New York, the statewide anti-hunger group, urged lawmakers in written testimony to the Legislature in January to keep the money flowing. “As families face cuts to other benefits and services, it will be especially critical to sustain this investment,” the group wrote.
Counties are already paying
School districts are not the only local governments absorbing the SNAP changes. Beginning Oct. 1, the federal share of SNAP administrative costs dropped from 50 percent to 25 percent, and under New York’s funding structure counties pick up the rest.
Erie County estimates the change will cost it $10.2 million in lost federal reimbursement in 2027, plus $3.6 million in employment and training costs, for a total of about $13.8 million, Spectrum News reported after County Executive Mark Poloncarz released his 2027 budget last week. The county estimates that a separate change to SNAP benefit funding, due in October 2027, could cost about $55 million a year if the state passes it along.
“It’s having a huge ramification. And it’s not just Erie County. Every county is dealing with this,” Mr. Poloncarz told Spectrum News.
Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties, put the statewide county cost at about $170 million a year in added SNAP administrative expenses. “That’s a real hardship on local governments charged with helping provide food to those in need,” Mr. Acquario told Spectrum News, adding, “There have been no commitments made by the governor, by the budget director of the state of New York.”
Who is accountable, and what could fix it
The chain of responsibility runs through three capitals. Congress wrote the eligibility changes that are shrinking the benefit rolls, and it is the only body that can reverse them or shield CEP from them, for example by letting states count children who lose SNAP solely because of the new rules. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sets the CEP formula, including the 1.6 multiplier and the threshold, by rule.
Albany controls the rest. The state made a legal promise that every child eats free, so any federal shortfall becomes a state budget line. The comptroller’s office has already reported that state tax receipts ran billions of dollars ahead of projections through midyear. The open question for the next state budget, due to be proposed in January, is whether the state sets money aside now for the school meal gap or waits until districts recalculate and the bills arrive.
There are also cheaper fixes. Direct certification, the data match that identifies eligible students, depends on how well state agencies share benefit enrollment with schools. Every eligible child who is missed lowers a school’s percentage and raises the state’s share of the bill, so tighter matching and outreach to families who still qualify protect both children and the state budget.
The Buffalo Chronicle has also asked the State Education Department’s Office of Child Nutrition, the Division of the Budget and Erie County for comment on how many Western New York schools are near the CEP thresholds and what the state plans to set aside. This story will be updated with their responses.
For families, nothing changes at the lunch line this year. The question is who pays for the meal, and for how long Albany can afford to keep its promise if Washington keeps pulling back.
Updated Oct. 21, 2026: This story was updated to include comment from the state comptroller’s office.
Leave a Reply