Tennessee may have to carve out an additional $220 million from its budget next year to continue funding the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed more of the program’s costs to states.
SNAP is also know as food assistance or food stamps.
The total new costs to Tennessee depend, in part, on the state’s SNAP payment error rate — a measure of the number of households that receive either less or more food assistance than they are entitled to. States whose error rate exceeds the 6% goal set by Congress will be financially penalized starting in October 2027.
Those changes went into effect Thursday. The federal spending bill also increased states’ share of administrative costs from 50% to 75%. The increase tacked on an extra $58 million to the Department of Human Services budget in fiscal year 2026, Tennessee’s budget shows.
Tennessee’s error rate was 9.44% for the 2025 fiscal year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, below the national average of 10.62%. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows states to choose to use error rates from either 2025 or 2026 to calculate how much they will need to contribute. While fiscal year 2026 ended Sept. 30, the error rate data is not expected to be released until June 2027, so Tennessee may not know how much it will be responsible for until then.