A deduction that food-stamp households had only recently gained has already been taken away, folded into a sweeping tax-and-spending law that most coverage never tied to a home internet bill. The change removes internet and other telecommunications costs from the formula that helps set a household’s monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefit, undoing a rule that was barely a year old. For the many households that had counted an internet bill as part of their shelter costs, the practical effect is a smaller calculated deduction and a smaller monthly benefit, with no new paperwork explaining the drop and no obvious link back to the law that caused it.
A Deduction Congress Erased
Section 10104 of Public Law 119-21, the reconciliation measure Congress passed and titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is captioned “Restrictions on Internet Expenses” and bars state SNAP agencies from treating internet costs as an allowable shelter expense when calculating a household’s excess shelter deduction. President Trump signed the bill into law on July 4, 2025. The shelter deduction, along with the Standard Utility Allowance states use to estimate a household’s home energy and communication costs, is one of the levers that determines how much a SNAP household receives each month; stripping a cost category out of that calculation lowers the deduction and, for many households, lowers the benefit that follows from it.
The reversal is notable because the opposite change had only just taken hold. A final rule USDA published November 18, 2024 standardized how states calculate heating and cooling utility allowances and, for the first time, let states fold basic internet costs into that figure as an allowable utility expense, with states given until October 1, 2025 to finish updating their methodologies. The 2025 tax law arrived before that window closed and shut the door it had just opened.
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The Memo That Made It Current
USDA’s food-assistance arm — the Food and Nutrition Service at the time, since reorganized as the Food and Nutrition Administration — issued an implementation memo on August 15, 2025 telling state agencies not to include internet costs when they built their Fiscal Year 2026 Standard Utility Allowance values. That guidance, still posted on the agency’s current Standard Utility Allowances implementation-memo page, is the document that turned the statutory restriction into an operating rule for every state agency running SNAP. Fiscal Year 2026 began October 1, 2025, which means the internet exclusion has now been in effect for roughly eleven months.
The agency’s rebrand matters for anyone trying to verify the rule today: pages that once lived at fns.usda.gov now resolve under the fna.usda.gov domain, and the underlying guidance — not merely the web address — is what confirms the change is a current, implemented policy rather than a proposal still working through the rulemaking process.
States Told To Stop Immediately
The August memo went further than simply setting a rule for the new fiscal year. State agencies that had already built Fiscal Year 2025 utility allowance values around an FNS-approved waiver including internet costs were directed to stop using those values right away rather than wait for the fiscal year to turn over on its own. The agency’s live Standard Utility Allowances page lists the current methodology every state must certify against, and internet is absent from the categories a state may count.
How Many Households Feel It
The Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that tracked the provision through Congress, estimated in its published analysis that about 65 percent of SNAP households — on the order of 13 to 14 million households nationwide — see their calculated shelter costs shrink because internet no longer counts, with the reduction averaging close to $10 a month per affected household in each year from 2026 through 2034. Those figures come from FRAC’s analysis of the provision, not from USDA itself, and they describe an average rather than any individual household’s outcome. USDA’s own public materials confirm the mechanism — internet is excluded from the shelter-cost calculation — without publishing a household-level dollar estimate of their own.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
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David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
