The People Just Above the Line
An estimated 25 million food-insecure Americans, nearly half, likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP. They are people in households that likely make too much for SNAP and still too little for groceries, and they are the part of hunger we are trained not to picture.
Ask most people to describe someone going hungry in America and you get the same picture: out of work, out of luck, probably without a home. That picture is real, but it is only part of the story. The missing part is large. Nearly half of the people who cannot reliably afford food, an estimated 25 million in 2024, may have had incomes too high for SNAP, the country's main food benefit.
They sit above a line. SNAP, the federal food program, cuts off eligibility at an income threshold. Above that point the help simply stops, whether or not a family can actually cover groceries. The line is a number on a federal form. Hunger does not check the form before it arrives. (For how the pieces fit together, start with the companion primer, How to Think About Food Insecurity.)
Earning too much for SNAP and too little for food is not a contradiction. For millions, it is the ordinary shape of the month.
SNAP eligibility turns on an income cutoff, and the cutoff is lower than most people assume.
Federal rules set SNAP's gross income limit at 130 percent of the federal poverty line for households without an elderly or disabled member. For a family of four, the limit in force from October 2026 through September 2027 is about $42,900 a year. Most states lift that ceiling, and more than half of all states set it at 200 percent of poverty, about $66,000 for that same family. North Carolina is one of them. Fewer than a third of states hold to the 130 percent mark.
Cross it by a dollar and the benefit ends. The cutoff does not ask what rent costs in your county, or what a week of groceries runs at your store, or whether a medical bill ate the margin last month. It asks one question, about gross income, and answers in a single word. Plenty of households clear that bar and still cannot keep the refrigerator full.
Far from a rare edge case, this gap is built into how the program is drawn.
Feeding America's county-level study estimates that in 2024, about 25 million people, roughly 48 percent of everyone experiencing food insecurity in the United States, may have earned too much to qualify for SNAP. Nearly half of hungry Americans, in other words, are likely on the wrong side of the line.
Who the line leaves out
Everyone facing hunger in the U.S., 2024, by likely SNAP eligibility. Drawn to scale.
An estimated 48 percent of people facing hunger, about 25 million, likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP. And not everyone in the other group is enrolled. Source: Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2026 (modeled estimates).
There is another kind of gap, too. Among the people who do qualify, not all are enrolled. The USDA estimates that about 12 percent of those eligible do not receive benefits, whether from paperwork, stigma, or simply not knowing they qualify. Put the two groups together and the program, vital as it is, reaches far fewer people than the full number who are hungry.
The poverty line behind the cutoff is a national number. The cost of a grocery cart is a local one. In Buncombe, the two pull hard against each other.
The cutoff does not adjust for local prices. It treats a dollar in Asheville the same as a dollar in a low-cost county elsewhere in North Carolina. But Buncombe carries one of the highest costs of living in North Carolina. Just Economics of Western North Carolina set a living wage for a single adult here at $24.10 an hour for 2026. That is well above what much local work pays, and far above the SNAP line. A person can earn enough to lose eligibility and nowhere near enough to absorb Asheville rent and Asheville grocery prices.
That is why the line at a local pantry includes people who walked in straight from a shift. They are not gaming anything. They are employed, ineligible, and short on food at the same time, which the math allows and the stereotype does not.
A food pantry is one of the doors still open to them, at least for the food it gets from private donations. The federal food a pantry hands out has its own income test. In North Carolina a household must qualify for SNAP or declare an income below 200 percent of poverty, the same line SNAP uses here. Food from private donations is not covered by that test, and Feeding America says the size of the group over SNAP's limit highlights the vital role of charitable food assistance. That is a separate question from whether charity can replace the federal benefit; it cannot, and that is taken up in a companion piece, Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger.
Hunger does not end at the eligibility line.
Qualifying for help and needing it are two different things. The distance between them has a number: in 2024, about 25 million people, nearly half of the food insecure, likely had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP. Some of them are working, and in a high-cost place like Buncombe they are easy to find, one aisle over at the pantry, still in a work shirt.
The line is not a fact of the world; it is a choice about where help stops, drawn with little regard for what food and rent cost in any particular county, and it can be drawn differently. Until it is, the fairest thing we can do is stop picturing hunger as something that happens only to other kinds of people, and start seeing the neighbor who earns a paycheck and still runs out of food before the month is over.
Every group in our directory is local, vetted, and doing this work right now. Pick one and back it. →