The Impact of SNAP Emergency Allotments

Starting in April 2020, states could award Emergency Allotment, or EA, payments to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients to supplement the formula-based SNAP benefits that they otherwise would have received. Take, for example, families with two members in 2020, prior to COVID-19. Maximum monthly SNAP benefits for such a family were $355, and average benefits were $229. EA payments increased these benefits by an average of $126 during phase 1 of the policy and by $166 during phase 2. Increases for individual households over the formulabased benefit amount ranged from a low of $95 to a high of over $340. Nationwide, EA payments were eliminated after the February 2023 payment, and SNAP benefits reverted for each family to the value that the SNAP benefit formula allocates.

IPR economist Diane Schanzenbach estimates the amount and impact of EA benefits. As described in more detail in the report, some states opted to terminate EA payments while they were still allowable. This variation provided an opportunity to estimate the impact of EA payments on the share of households reporting that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat over the previous week. On average, EA payments reduced the likelihood that a household experienced food insufficiency by about 9%, with larger impacts for households with children with a Black or Hispanic respondent.