More than one of every 10 food stamp payments nationwide is for an incorrect amount that is usually on the high side, according to new data made public by the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration (FNA) office.

The national average of improper payments by FNA for 2025 is 10.62%, costing an estimated $10.1 billion in the program that spent more than $101 billion that year in providing assistance to enable the tax-funded purchase of approved food and drink products.

Over-payments made up 9.28% of the total with underpayments accounting for only 1.33%. Alaska had the highest overall error rate at 23.15%, followed by the District of Columbia at 18.66% and New Mexico at 16.81%. Delaware was fourth highest at 16% and Georgia was fifth at 15.21%.

At the other end of the scale, South Dakota had the lowest improper payments rate at 2.5%, followed by Idaho at 3.9%, Wyoming at 4.0%, Kentucky at 4.7%, and Iowa at 5.3%.

No data was available for 2020, the last full year in office of President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, or for 2021, the first year of his successor in the Oval Office, former President Joe Biden, due to the COVID pandemic that took more than one million American lives beginning in January 2020. Federal rules regulating eligibility for food stamps were essentially suspended for nearly two years during that period in an effort to make sure everybody had enough to eat.

The average error rate for the remaining three years (2022-24) of the Biden administration was 11.28%, compared to 6.82% under Trump’s remaining three years (2017-19). The error rate average was significantly lower during the administration of President Barack Obama at 3.6% for the years 2010 through 2015.

At the outset of his second term in the White House, Trump directed Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to take aggressive actions to lower the improper payment rates to ensure that nutrition that should be made available to the genuinely needy is not given instead to fraudsters or in the wrong amounts.

In response, the federal government is now scheduled to impose tangible penalties on states with unacceptably high improper payment rates, beginning for most of them in 2028.

“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program],” Rollins said in the June 24 statement that made the latest error rates public. “USDA has taken historic action to help interested states curb SNAP waste, and I hope other states, regardless of political leadership, prioritize needy families and the American taxpayer over politics.”

Rollins noted that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 “added new guardrails for states’ Payment Error Rates (PER), implementing real financial consequences for states that mismanage taxpayer dollars. States with PERs at or above the 6% threshold will be responsible for covering 5%, 10%, or 15% of their states’ benefits. The higher their PER, the higher the percentage — and in most cases, as soon as October 1, 2027. The FY 2025 PER is the first year that could be used to calculate those percentages.”

“In addition to this matching fund requirement, states with PER at or above 6% threshold are required to submit a Corrective Action Plan to USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration detailing how they will address the root cause of their errors. Some of these states may also be liable for a separate financial penalty as part of the SNAP quality control process,” Rollins added.

Experts caution that the official error rates almost certainly underestimate the actual number of such payments and thus of their cost to taxpayers.

Baseline Policy’s Matthew Dickerson, for example, said, “We know that improper payments are likely significantly higher than reported amounts. The 2014 Farm Bill instructed the Department of Agriculture to ignore improper payments up to a ‘quality control tolerance threshold. That threshold was set at $37 in 2014 and increases with inflation each year. The error tolerance threshold was $57 in 2025. Therefore, any payment error of $57 or less was excluded from the official 2025 payment error-rate calculation.”

Dickerson also pointed out that “a last-minute ‘carve-out’” provision inserted by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) delays implementation of the state cost share for the states with the worst payment error rates. For states with an error rate of 13.33% or greater, no cost share is required until 2029. States whose error rates exceed 13.3% in 2026 do not pay a cost share until 2030. This provision incentivizes states to tolerate higher food stamp payment errors and provided a federal financed reward to the most irresponsible state.