Food insecurity in households with children often makes the headlines, but the United States’ growing older population is increasingly food insecure. In 2023, 9.2% of households with adults ages 60 and older were food insecure—that amounts to 7.4 million older individuals with “limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), one of the largest and most successful U.S. food and nutrition assistance programs, is designed to address the economic roots of food insecurity. In FY23, nearly 10% of the U.S. population ages 60 and above participated in SNAP. As a percentage of SNAP’s caseload, such households had fluctuated between 16% and 21%, until 2010. Since 2010, the share has steadily increased, reaching 33% by 2023. Similarly, the absolute number of older adult SNAP participants grew slowly from 1.9 million in 1994 to 2.7 million in 2009 before ballooning to 7.8 million participants in 2023.

The average monthly household benefit of $188 per SNAP household has been shown to increase food consumption and reduce health-care utilization and costs. Yet, SNAP participation rates among older adults lag far behind those of other age groups. In 2022, 55% of eligible older people received SNAP benefits, compared with 88% of adults overall and nearly 100% of eligible children.

This brief describes three flaws in SNAP’s design when it comes to serving older adults: its eligibility, certification, and benefit-determination processes come with high levels of administrative burden; the value of SNAP benefits is low compared with the high costs associated with redeeming them; and high state-level variation in SNAP policies produces substantially different conditions depending on where recipients live. Throughout, we illustrate these challenges with quotes from 63 low-income older adults we interviewed in 2021 for our book Food for Thought: Understanding Older Adult Food Insecurity.