USDA Thrifty Food Plan: How the Budget and Benefit Are Calculated

The USDA Thrifty Food Plan is a federal model that identifies the lowest-cost combination of foods capable of meeting national nutrition standards for a reference family of four, and its June cost each year sets the maximum SNAP benefit for the following fiscal year.¹ For fiscal year 2026, that produces a maximum monthly allotment of $994 for a four-person household in the 48 contiguous states.

The USDA publishes four food plans at rising cost levels: Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal.² Only the Thrifty Food Plan carries legal weight. Federal law designates its June cost for the reference family of four as the basis for maximum SNAP allotments beginning each October 1.³ The other three plans serve as benchmarks for nutrition research and don’t affect benefit levels.

The Reference Family and How Other Households Compare

Every Thrifty Food Plan calculation starts with the same household: a man and a woman aged 20 to 50, a child aged 6 to 8, and a child aged 9 to 11.² The model calculates a precise monthly food cost for this family, and every other household size is derived from it using fixed statutory ratios.³

1 person: 30 percent of the four-person allotment
2 people: 55 percent
3 people: 79 percent
4 people: 100 percent
5 people: 119 percent
6 people: 143 percent
7 people: 158 percent
8 people: 180 percent
Each additional person: 22 percent more, capped at 200 percent total

Smaller households get more per person than the reference family because they lose the economies of scale that come with cooking for four. A single person receives 30 percent of the four-person amount rather than 25 percent. Larger households get less per person because shared meals stretch further.

What the Model Actually Solves For

The plan doesn’t just find cheap food. It finds the cheapest food combination that meets two layers of federal nutrition standards. The first is the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which sets evidence-based recommendations for healthy eating patterns.⁴ The second is the Dietary Reference Intakes set by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which give quantitative targets for protein, vitamins, minerals, and macronutrient ranges.

These standards work as hard rules. The food basket must hit every required nutrient target while staying below thresholds for sodium, added sugars, and saturated fat. A diet that would meet calorie needs but blow past the sodium limit is rejected. This prevents the budget from relying on the sort of inexpensive but nutritionally poor choices a pure cost-minimization exercise would produce.

The model also has to reflect what people actually eat. Consumption data comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and price data comes from national retail scanner databases covering hundreds of specific food items.⁵ Within each food category, the model separates items at the 35th price percentile, favoring lower-cost versions of the foods people already buy without assuming everyone shops at the absolute cheapest store. The market basket includes convenience items like canned beans, jarred pasta sauce, frozen vegetables, and ready-to-eat cereals, so the plan does not assume every meal is cooked from scratch.

How the Plan Turns Into Your Benefit

The Thrifty Food Plan sets the ceiling, but most SNAP households don’t receive the maximum. Federal law calculates your actual benefit as the maximum allotment for your household size minus 30 percent of your household’s net income.⁶ The logic is that you’re expected to contribute about a third of your own income toward food, and SNAP covers the gap between that contribution and what a nutritious diet costs.

A household with zero net income receives the full maximum. As income rises, the benefit shrinks by 30 cents for every dollar of net income. For one- and two-person households, federal law guarantees a minimum monthly benefit equal to 8 percent of the one-person maximum, rounded to the nearest whole dollar. For FY2026, that minimum is $24.

FY2026 Maximum Monthly Allotments

The following maximums apply in the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia from October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026:¹

1 person: $298
2 people: $546
3 people: $785
4 people: $994
5 people: $1,183
6 people: $1,421
7 people: $1,571
8 people: $1,789
Each additional person: $218 more

These are the ceilings. Your actual benefit depends on the income calculation above.

Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands

Food costs more outside the lower 48, so federal law requires separate cost adjustments for those areas.³ Alaska is further divided into zones reflecting the price gap between Anchorage and remote communities. For a four-person household in FY2026, the maximum monthly allotments by region are:⁷

48 states and D.C.: $994
Urban Alaska: $1,285
Rural Alaska (zone I): $1,639
Rural Alaska (zone II): $1,995
Hawaii: $1,689
Guam: $1,465
U.S. Virgin Islands: $1,278

Allotments for Guam and the Virgin Islands are capped by statute so they cannot exceed the cost of food in the 50 states and D.C.

What SNAP Dollars Can and Can’t Buy

The Thrifty Food Plan budgets only for food, and SNAP benefits can only buy food. Eligible items include fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, bread, cereals, snack foods, non-alcoholic beverages, and seeds or plants that produce food for the household.⁸ The plan does not include household essentials like soap, diapers, cleaning supplies, or hygiene products, and SNAP does not cover them. Also excluded: vitamins and supplements, hot prepared foods sold at the point of sale, alcohol, and tobacco.

The plan also does not budget for the time it takes to cook. The model treats preparation labor as free, which is a well-known limitation. Including convenience items in the basket softens this, but the selection still leans toward foods that require some home preparation, because those foods deliver more nutrition per dollar.

How the Numbers Change Each October

Between full re-evaluations, the Thrifty Food Plan’s cost is updated every October 1 based on changes in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers over the 12 months ending in June.³ This keeps maximum allotments roughly in line with grocery inflation without requiring the USDA to rebuild the food basket every year. The annual adjustment changes only the dollar amount; the actual foods in the basket change only during a full re-evaluation.

The 2021 Re-evaluation and What Comes Next

The 2018 Farm Bill required the USDA to re-evaluate the Thrifty Food Plan by 2022 and every five years afterward, the first time Congress had mandated periodic updates. The USDA completed its first re-evaluation under that mandate in 2021, and the cost of the plan for the reference family rose 21 percent compared with the inflation-adjusted cost of the prior version.⁵

The biggest methodological change was dropping the cost-neutrality constraint that had governed every previous update for more than 45 years. Under the old approach, the USDA had to keep the plan’s cost roughly the same in real terms whenever it updated the basket, which meant the plan could never reflect a genuinely higher cost of eating well. The 2021 version instead started with what a healthy, practical diet actually costs and then determined a price. Other changes included using dietary intake data from all income levels rather than only low-income households, drawing prices from retail scanner data, and assuming active physical activity levels for children aged 2 to 11 (up from low-active in the 2006 version), which raised calorie needs and food costs for families with kids.

The rules for future updates have since shifted. The current statute provides that the Secretary may re-evaluate the market baskets of the Thrifty Food Plan not earlier than October 1, 2027, and adds that any such re-evaluation cannot increase the plan’s cost.³ This is a significant departure from the 2018 Farm Bill’s original framework, which mandated re-evaluations and placed no cap on them. The 21 percent jump in 2021 proved politically contentious, and the amended statute effectively prevents a repeat. Future re-evaluations can still update the foods in the basket to reflect current eating patterns and nutrition science, but any cost change from the re-evaluation itself must be neutral or downward. Routine annual CPI adjustments are not affected by that limit.

1
USDA Food and Nutrition Service. SNAP Maximum Allotments and Deductions
2
Food and Nutrition Service. USDA Food Plans
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 7 USC 2012 – Definitions
4
Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025
5
USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Thrifty Food Plan, 2021
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 7 USC 2017 – Value of Allotment
7
Food and Nutrition Service. SNAP FY2026 Maximum Allotment Amounts for Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and US Virgin Islands
8
Food and Nutrition Service. What Can SNAP Buy?