Rankings · Health

Highest food assistance by state

Adults who received food assistance in the past year.

This measure has no better end. The order describes the states, it does not rank them — see the other direction.

Adults who received SNAP benefits in the past twelve months, modelled the same way. Shown as a plain fact rather than as good or bad: a high figure reflects both how much need there is and how well a state enrols the people who qualify, and those pull in opposite directions. Two counties with identical hardship can differ here purely because one state makes applying easier. Coverage is partial and unevenly so: these questions come from an optional survey module that not every state runs, so around 2,300 of 3,143 counties have a figure and the missing ones are whole states rather than scattered gaps. A blank state here means its survey did not ask, not that nobody there is affected.

  1. 1Louisiana19.0%
  2. 2West Virginia17.8%
  3. 3New Mexico17.1%
  4. 4California15.7%
  5. 5Oklahoma15.2%
  6. 6Nevada15.1%
  7. 7Michigan14.4%
  8. 8Maine14.3%
  9. 9New York14.3%
  10. 10Georgia14.2%
  11. 11Alabama14.1%
  12. 12Massachusetts14.1%
  13. 13Illinois13.8%
  14. 14Mississippi13.7%
  15. 15Rhode Island13.3%
  16. 16District of Columbia13.0%
  17. 17Wisconsin12.6%
  18. 18North Carolina12.4%
  19. 19Hawaii12.1%
  20. 20Maryland11.8%
  21. 21Arkansas11.7%
  22. 22Connecticut11.7%
  23. 23Delaware11.7%
  24. 24Ohio11.7%
  25. 25Arizona11.1%
  26. 26Missouri10.8%
  27. 27Virginia10.7%
  28. 28South Carolina10.5%
  29. 29Alaska10.3%
  30. 30Iowa10.0%
  31. 31Idaho8.8%
  32. 32Indiana8.7%
  33. 33Nebraska8.6%
  34. 34Montana8.4%
  35. 35New Jersey8.4%
  36. 36Minnesota7.9%
  37. 37Kansas7.5%
  38. 38North Dakota6.8%
  39. 39New Hampshire6.5%
  40. 40Utah6.1%

Not ranked, because this measure is not published for them: Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming. This state does not include these questions in its health survey, so no figure is published for anywhere in it. That is a gap in the survey, not a finding about the place.

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Source: CDC PLACES. · How this is built