The General Assembly’s Interim Joint Committee on Appropriations and Revenue received some welcome news regarding the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) during its August meeting on Wednesday.
The state’s SNAP payment error rate is currently at 3.7 percent for 2025. That rate is required to remain below six percent for the federal government to continue covering 100 percent of the SNAP benefits cost going into the 2028 federal fiscal year.
The new policy is the result of House Bill 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the U.S. Congress passed earlier this summer.
Lesa Dennis, the commissioner for the Kentucky Department of Community Based Services, within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS), said the coverage rate for the 2028 federal fiscal year will be based on the 2025 or 2026 payment error rate.
“A payment error occurs when a household receives more or less than the correct benefit amount set at the $58 tolerance level,” she said. “SNAP payment errors are identified through a quality control process then the error is analyzed to identify opportunities to prevent the error from being repeated.”
If the current error rate rises above six percent, Kentucky could be on the hook for up to 15 percent of the benefit costs, with the cost sharing requirement rates on a sliding scale.
She told the panel if the error rate rises above six percent but stays below eight percent, the state’s cost sharing requirement would be five percent, or an estimated $62.6 million, for example. An error rate of 10 percent or more would lead to a 15 percent cost sharing requirement, or an estimated $187.8 million.
She pointed out that the state’s payment error rate has already improved compared to 2023’s error rate of 7.2 percent, while the national average at that time was nearly 12 percent.
Rep. Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, a committee co-chair, encouraged Dennis and the cabinet to ask for lawmakers’ help if needed.
“We’re all rooting for you to pull that error rate down and keep it down” Petrie stated. “It looks like it’s doing good. Kentucky is not a bad outlier of a higher error rate, historically. This is something that is within our control to address and keep it below that 6 percent, which helps everybody.”
By Tom Latek, Kentucky Today
