A change buried in last year’s sprawling tax-and-spending law is now reaching older Americans who long assumed food assistance came without a work test. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the age ceiling for SNAP work requirements from 55 to 64, pulling a group that had been exempt for decades into rules that demand 80 hours of work or training a month. Analysts estimate more than 1 million adults ages 55 to 64 could lose benefits as the change phases in. For people living on thin fixed incomes, the stakes are measured in grocery bills.
The Work Rule Now Reaching Adults in Their 60s
SNAP has long imposed a stricter standard on so-called able-bodied adults without dependents, a category the program shorthand calls ABAWDs. People in that group can receive benefits for no more than three months in a three-year period unless they meet a work requirement. What the new law changed is not the requirement itself but who it covers, sweeping in adults up to their 65th birthday who were previously shielded by an age exemption.
Under the Agriculture Department’s work rules, a non-exempt adult must work, volunteer, or participate in an approved training program for at least 80 hours a month — roughly 20 hours a week — to keep benefits beyond the three-month limit. Falling short means losing food aid, not because income rose but because the required hours were not logged and reported. For a 62-year-old with a chronic condition or a spotty local job market, clearing that bar every single month is the whole challenge.
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How the 2025 Law Redrew the Age Line
The expansion comes from the reconciliation law enacted in July 2025, which raised the ABAWD age ceiling as part of a broader package of cuts to federal food spending. Because the change is already law rather than a proposal, states are moving to apply it, and the older adults it captures face the requirement as their cases come up for review rather than at some distant future date. Congressional budget scorekeepers projected the law’s SNAP provisions would reduce federal spending by well over $100 billion across the coming decade, a savings that depends in part on benefits ending for people who cannot meet the new standard.
The people most exposed are those in their late 50s and early 60s who are too young for Social Security’s full benefits but old enough to face age discrimination in hiring, health limits, or caregiving duties that make 80 monthly hours hard to sustain. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the expanded rules put more than 1 million older adults at risk of losing benefits, a figure that reflects both the size of the newly covered age band and how often people in it struggle to document steady work.
Much of the risk is administrative rather than economic. Even people who are working enough hours can lose benefits if they fail to document and report them on time, a churn that federal data has long shown pushes eligible recipients off the rolls. For older adults less comfortable with online portals, or those juggling irregular gig, seasonal, and part-time work whose hours swing month to month, the reporting itself can become the reason the aid stops rather than any genuine failure to work.
The dollars involved are not trivial for the households in question. SNAP benefits average roughly a couple hundred dollars a month per person, money that for many older recipients is the difference between a full grocery cart and a rationed one. For someone bridging the years between a lost job and the age they can claim Social Security, that monthly benefit often fills a gap no other program covers. Losing it does not just strain a budget; it shifts costs onto food banks, family members, and the emergency rooms where untreated diet-related illness eventually lands.
The Exemptions and the Debate Over the Cut
The law does preserve exemptions, and eligibility for them is where many cases will turn. People who are medically unable to work, caring for a young child, or formally determined unfit for employment can be excused from the requirement, and the program’s eligibility rules spell out the categories. The practical risk is that eligible people lose benefits anyway because they do not know an exemption applies or cannot navigate the paperwork to claim it — a gap between who the rules exempt on paper and who actually keeps their aid.
Supporters of the change frame it as a return to the program’s original bargain, arguing that able-bodied adults who can work should, and that tightening the rules restrains a benefit that had drifted from that principle. They point out that the requirement can be satisfied through volunteering or job training, not only paid employment, and that the exemptions are meant to protect those who genuinely cannot comply. In their view, extending the standard to adults in their late 50s and early 60s simply treats them as capable rather than writing them off as unemployable a decade before retirement.
Opponents counter that the label “able-bodied” does not fit a 60-year-old with arthritis or a heart condition, and that the real effect is to strip food aid from people near retirement who have the least ability to add hours. The outcome will hinge on how aggressively states enforce the reporting and how well they steer genuinely exempt older adults away from the cutoff. For the more than 1 million people the estimates flag, the coming months will decide whether the new age line means a paperwork hurdle they clear or a benefit they lose.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed against primary sources by The Money Overview editorial team.
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