USDA has begun canceling food stamp work-requirement waivers that states relied on for years, not because those waivers expired on their own terms but because the legal basis behind them no longer exists. The “lack of sufficient jobs” finding that once let a state waive the three-month time limit for able-bodied adults was the single most common justification nationwide, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act erased it outright. In its place, states outside Alaska and Hawaii may request a waiver only where an area’s unemployment rate runs above 10 percent, verified against federal labor data USDA now requires with every request.
The “Insufficient Jobs” Basis Is Gone, Not Just Harder to Meet
For most of the time limit’s history, an area did not need a specific unemployment number to qualify for a waiver; it needed only a state finding that the area lacked sufficient jobs, a standard broad enough that the vast majority of approved waivers nationwide rested on it rather than on a hard unemployment threshold. States used the standard to cover entire counties, labor market areas, or in some cases entire states, often for multi-year stretches. That flexibility is the provision the One Big Beautiful Bill Act removed, and USDA’s October 3 memo describes the removal as complete, not narrowed, with no phase-out period for the underlying legal basis itself.
In its place, the statute now requires evidence that an area’s unemployment rate exceeds 10 percent, and USDA’s waivers implementation memorandum specifies exactly what counts as evidence: a recent 12-month average above 10 percent, a recent three-month average above 10 percent, or a documented historical seasonal rate above that line. State agencies must use Bureau of Labor Statistics data wherever it is available, and may turn to alternate sources only for areas the BLS does not cover.
The new standard also caps how long a waiver can run. USDA will not approve a waiver lasting longer than 12 months regardless of how far above 10 percent an area’s unemployment rate sits, which means even a state that clears the higher bar must return with fresh data on an annual basis rather than relying on a multi-year designation.
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Active Waivers Face a 30-Day Clock
The end of the insufficient-jobs basis did not just close the door to new waivers; it retroactively undercut waivers states were already operating under the old standard, some of which had been renewed year after year without ever citing an unemployment figure at all. USDA’s memo strongly encourages state agencies to voluntarily terminate any active waiver approved under the discontinued criterion through the federal Waiver Information Management System, rather than waiting for Washington to act on their behalf.
For states that do not act on their own, the agency set a hard deadline: USDA will terminate any lack-of-sufficient-jobs waiver 30 days after the memo’s issuance, a cutoff that fell in early November 2025 according to the same guidance still listed as current on the Food and Nutrition Administration’s website. A narrow exception applies only to waivers that were already scheduled to expire on or before November 2, 2025 on their own terms, which need no separate termination action.
Before a waiver disappears, USDA expects states to prepare for the areas it covered to lose waiver protection entirely: updating eligibility systems to start counting the three-month clock, notifying households in the newly exposed areas, and training eligibility workers who may not have processed an active time-limit case in years if their state waived broadly under the old standard.
Alaska and Hawaii Get a Higher Bar, Not an Exemption From One
Alaska and Hawaii operate under a different formula rather than the flat 10 percent line. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act lets the Secretary approve a waiver for either state where an area’s unemployment rate reaches 150 percent of the national average, a threshold USDA’s September 4, 2025 information memorandum confirms has no expiration date attached to the waiver authority itself.
A separate mechanism, the “ABAWD good faith exemption,” lets the Secretary excuse Alaska or Hawaii from the time limit statewide if the state demonstrates a genuine effort to comply, backed by a description of its administrative barriers, a description of specific implementation challenges such as funding or system procurement, and a timeline for full implementation, plus quarterly progress reports once approved. Unlike the 150-percent waiver, this exemption authority is not open-ended: any exemption granted under it expires no later than December 31, 2028, a sunset date confirmed in both USDA memoranda on the subject, with no provision for renewal past that point described anywhere in the guidance.
The practical effect reaches well beyond two states. USDA’s own tribal consultation materials, prepared for an October 2025 session with federally recognized tribes, told participants directly that the agency expects “very few areas across the country to qualify for ABAWD waivers” under the new standard, “including far fewer reservation areas” that had historically relied on the discontinued jobs-based finding. A threshold written as a single percentage is, in USDA’s own estimate, expected to close a waiver system that once covered a far broader map.
Reporting Work Hours When No Waiver Applies
A canceled area waiver does not arrive with its own countdown clock; it simply means the standard three-month limit starts applying in places where it had not applied in years, often the same year a household’s SNAP or Medicaid renewal is already due. Tracking when a waiver ends in a specific county is a separate task from tracking when a household’s own paperwork is due, and the two deadlines rarely land on the same state-published calendar.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer is a 13-page organizer covering 51 state packs and a renewal and reporting calendar, paired with a renewal document checklist and guidance on the 90-day window after coverage is dropped.
Compare one state’s rules against another across the 51 state packs 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.
