Ten states now restrict what Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients can buy with their benefits, and three more are set to join within a roughly 48-hour span at the turn of the fiscal year: Montana’s waiver takes effect September 30, with Ohio and Virginia following on October 1, according to USDA’s own food-restriction waiver tracker. The expansion is not uniform. Even as those three states prepare to enforce new grocery-aisle rules, five previously approved waivers sit frozen by a federal court order, with no appeal on the public record. The map of which states can and cannot police SNAP purchases is shifting in two directions at once.
Three States Join Within a 48-Hour Span at Fiscal Year-End
Montana’s restriction on high-sugar beverages, energy drinks, candy and prepared desserts becomes enforceable on September 30, the final day of federal fiscal year 2026. Ohio and Virginia both start the following day, October 1, the first day of fiscal year 2027, though their rules target different items: Ohio excludes sugar-sweetened beverages and, uniquely among current waivers, all fountain drinks regardless of sugar content, while Virginia’s waiver covers what USDA’s tracker describes simply as sweetened beverages. All three were formally requested and approved months earlier; only the enforcement date is imminent.
Montana’s waiver traces back to a request Governor Greg Gianforte’s administration filed on March 31, 2026, which USDA approved on May 19 as a two-year demonstration project. The approval letter, signed by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, frames the restriction as a test of whether narrowing what SNAP dollars can buy changes health outcomes among participants, with the state required to submit data for USDA’s ongoing evaluation. Nothing in that approval extends automatically beyond the two-year window, meaning Montana’s rule has a built-in expiration unless federal officials renew it.
Ohio’s version has already been amended once. USDA approved the state’s original request, then approved a modification on June 23, 2026 that expanded the restricted-food definition before the rule had even taken effect, according to the state’s waiver approval file. That kind of pre-implementation revision does not appear elsewhere in the current batch of waivers, and it means Ohio retailers are preparing for a broader restriction than the one Ohio’s SNAP agency originally proposed months earlier.
Free SNAP checklist: A missed recertification step can pause food benefits, and EBT problems have their own fixes. Get the free recertification and EBT checklist.
Five Approved Waivers Remain Frozen by a Court Order
Five states approved for similar waivers are not enforcing anything at all. On June 22, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in Aragon et al. v. Rollins, ordering that FNA’s approval of the waivers covering Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia be vacated and that implementation may not proceed. USDA’s own tracker now lists those five states with the court’s vacatur language in place of a start date, the only entries on the page that read that way.
No appeal shows up in USDA’s public record as of the agency’s most recent update to the tracker. That absence matters procedurally: a vacatur left unchallenged does not automatically get revived, and nothing on the page signals that the administration intends to seek one. Of the 23 state waivers USDA has approved since the program began, five are currently paused entirely by the court, ten are already enforced, and eight more carry future start dates that stretch out as far as February 2028.
For SNAP households in the five paused states, the practical reality has not changed since before any of this litigation began: the restrictions those states requested were never enforced, and shoppers there can still buy items that would be off-limits under an active waiver. That is a meaningfully different position than a state like Nebraska occupies on paper, where the waiver was set to expand later this fall to cover candy alongside its existing beverage restriction before the court order intervened.
The Restricted Item List Is Not the Same From State to State
USDA has had to issue separate guidance for retailers navigating the differences, because a single point-of-sale system serving multiple states now has to track distinct restricted-item lists rather than one uniform federal rule. Arkansas excludes soda, low-juice drinks, energy drinks and candy; Utah restricts only soft drinks; Louisiana adds candy to its energy-drink and soft-drink restriction; and Ohio’s fountain-drink language covers a dispensing method rather than a specific ingredient. None of the ten currently enforced waivers uses identical wording.
The rollout does not stop with this week’s cluster. Kansas and Missouri are both scheduled for February 15, 2027; Wyoming follows on February 1, 2027; Hawaii is set for April 1, 2027; and Nevada’s waiver does not take effect until February 1, 2028, nearly two years after Montana’s. Each additional state adds its own specific list of excluded items, which means the patchwork retailers and SNAP households now navigate is scheduled to keep expanding well past this fall.
Every one of these waivers, including the ten already enforced, is formally a two-year demonstration project subject to USDA evaluation, not a permanent change to federal food-assistance law. Whether Montana, Ohio and Virginia’s new restrictions outlast their evaluation period, and whether the five vacated waivers ever get revived, both depend on decisions that have not been made yet. What is settled, as of USDA’s September 16 update, is only the calendar: three more states join the list within about a day of each other, while five approved states remain unable to enforce the waivers they were already granted.
State SNAP Rules Change Faster Than Renewal Notices
The same administrative machinery that lets USDA approve a new purchase restriction in one state and leave another frozen by court order also governs when a household’s SNAP case comes up for renewal, and the two calendars rarely move together. A state can change what a benefit buys without changing when a case must be recertified, leaving the renewal paperwork as the one date that still determines whether the benefit exists at all. Medicaid eligibility for many of the same households runs on its own separate review cycle.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer is a 13-page organizer with 51 state packs and a renewal document checklist built around the 90-day window after coverage is dropped.
Compare the state-by-state renewal rules in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
