A change embedded in this year’s federal tax and spending law has raised the bar for waiving SNAP’s work-time limit for so-called able-bodied adults without dependents. Areas seeking a waiver must now show an unemployment rate over 10 percent, according to an October 2025 implementation memo from the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. The new standard replaces a looser test that let a state qualify an area simply by identifying a lack of sufficient jobs, a criterion the same law eliminated outright. Waivers granted under that old basis were terminated within a month of the memo’s release, cutting off an option state agencies had used broadly for years.
A single, higher bar replaces a looser one
Before this year’s changes, a state did not need to show unemployment above any fixed percentage to waive the SNAP time limit for an area. One available standard let it point only to a lack of sufficient jobs, without tying the request to any specific rate at all, while a second treated a 24-month unemployment rate just 20 percent above the national average as automatic grounds for approval. Neither test required the kind of hard double-digit number the program now demands everywhere.
How loose that second test had become is visible in how some states used it. California combined 52 of its 58 counties into a single waiver area with a blended 5.5 percent unemployment rate, folding Napa County’s 3.1 percent together with Imperial County’s 19.2 percent, according to a policy-research account of the pre-2025 rules. Nationwide, close to a third of waiver-eligible counties from 1997 through 2023 carried an unemployment rate below 5 percent, the same account found, despite qualifying for a waiver of the work-time limit.
USDA’s implementation memo confirms the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “removed” the lack-of-sufficient-jobs criterion entirely, along with the other qualifying paths states had used, leaving the unemployment-rate test as the only route to a waiver anywhere in the country.
The waiver status a caseworker confirms: Losing a work-time waiver depends on an area’s own unemployment data and a state’s own certification rules, details a federal memo does not track household by household. See the renewal document checklist and the state packs in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
Three ways to prove the number, and a 12-month cap
The new rule leaves states one test but three ways to document it. USDA’s memo says an area can qualify with “a recent 12-month average unemployment rate over 10 percent,” “a recent three-month average unemployment rate over 10 percent,” or “an historical seasonal unemployment rate over 10 percent,” and it directs states to use Bureau of Labor Statistics data or methods wherever that data is available, rather than a state’s own estimate.
FNS will not approve a waiver longer than 12 months no matter which of the three methods a state uses, the same memo states, so an area that clears the 10 percent bar this cycle must requalify with fresh data within a year rather than relying on a multi-year approval. Paired with the loss of the sufficient-jobs standard, the result is a program built to grant waivers less often, on narrower grounds, and for shorter stretches than it did before this year.
USDA’s separate waiver-standards page confirms the over-10-percent test applies broadly across states, while directing state agencies to fiscal-quarter status reports, rather than the standards page itself, for the current area-by-area list of which waivers hold approval under the new rule. Those quarterly reports, not the standards page, are where a caseworker or a household would have to look to confirm whether a specific county still qualifies.
The 30-day clock that ended the old waivers
Ronald Ward, the Food and Nutrition Service’s acting associate administrator for SNAP, signed the implementation memo on October 3, 2025, and it left state agencies no room to let an old-basis waiver run out its original term. FNS would terminate any waiver resting on the lack-of-sufficient-jobs criterion 30 days after the memo’s issuance, a deadline that fell on November 2, 2025.
States with a waiver already set to expire on or before that date needed to take no further action, the memo adds, since the waiver would lapse on its own schedule regardless. Every other waiver approved under the old standard ended on November 2 on the same federal timetable, whether the state’s original approval still had months or years left to run. An area that had qualified for a waiver years earlier under the sufficient-jobs test lost it on that fixed date, not at the end of whatever term its state had originally negotiated with USDA.
The memo does not estimate how many areas lost a waiver on November 2, and it sets no separate notice requirement for the households inside them beyond the normal SNAP certification process. That leaves each state’s own SNAP office as the practical source of an answer, since a household affected by the change may see it only as a certification notice describing a work-hour requirement that did not apply the year before. The memo is explicit that FNS, not the state, sets the termination date and the new qualifying standard; a state agency’s only discretion is in how it documents the unemployment figure it submits, not in whether the 10 percent bar applies.
What losing a work-time waiver changes
An area’s SNAP work-time waiver can no longer rest on a lack-of-sufficient-jobs finding, and even an unemployment rate that clears 10 percent only holds for up to 12 months before the state has to requalify with fresh data. An adult who loses that waiver becomes subject to the three-month limit on SNAP without meeting the program’s work-hour rule, a status many people in a newly unwaived area will not learn applies to them until a caseworker says so.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer includes 51 state packs and a renewal and reporting calendar built for tracking eligibility rules that can shift from one certification period to the next.
Look up the renewal and reporting calendar 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.
