A rule that used to stop at age 54 now follows a food-stamp recipient into the early 60s. Under the tax and spending law Congress passed in July 2025, adults ages 55 through 64 who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and do not have a child in the home must now document at least 80 hours a month of work, job training, or volunteering to keep receiving food assistance beyond three months. Federal officials describe the change as closing a loophole for able-bodied adults who can work. People who study how the program actually runs in practice warn that the paperwork behind the requirement, not the work itself, is what most often costs an older adult their benefits.
A Work Rule That Now Reaches Age 64
For most of the program’s modern history, the Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents provision, known inside SNAP as the ABAWD time limit, applied only to adults ages 18 through 54. Section 10102 of the 2025 law widely known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rewrote that age band, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration confirms the change took effect for SNAP applications and renewals processed on or after November 1, 2025. The agency, previously named the Food and Nutrition Service, still lists Section 10102 among the law’s provisions it is actively implementing. Adults age 65 and older remain fully exempt from the time limit. Everyone in between, including workers in their late 50s and early 60s who had never been subject to the rule before, are now held to the same three-month clock long applied to younger adults: document 80 hours of qualifying activity in a month, or lose food benefits after three countable months within a 36-month period.
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What Counts Toward the 80 Hours
The requirement can be satisfied with paid employment, self-employment, in-kind work performed for goods or services rather than money, unpaid work, volunteering, or some combination of these, as long as the hours add up to 80 in a calendar month. Enrolling in an approved job-training or education program on a comparable half-time schedule also qualifies. The Food and Nutrition Administration’s own published guidance lays out each qualifying category alongside the three-month, three-year time limit that follows a failure to comply. In practice, state agencies ask for proof: pay stubs, a letter from an employer, volunteer timesheets, or participation records from a SNAP employment and training provider. The reporting window is narrow. A change in hours generally must be reported within about ten days of occurring, and compliance is checked again at every redetermination, not only once at the initial application.
Why the Paperwork, Not the Job Search, Is the Bigger Risk
The harder question for someone newly covered by the rule is rarely whether 80 hours of qualifying activity exists to be found. It is whether that activity gets documented, in a format a caseworker will accept, before a deadline arrives. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that roughly 1.4 million adults ages 55 through 64 without children in the home are newly exposed to the time limit nationwide under an expansion of this scope, and its broader review of SNAP’s work-requirement history found that people have frequently been cut off despite being employed, exempt, or otherwise eligible, because a form went unfiled, an exemption code was never entered, or hours could not be verified before a deadline. Older applicants face an added complication researchers have documented for years: age-related hiring barriers and health limitations common among workers in their late 50s and early 60s that do not always rise to the level of a formally verified disability exemption, leaving someone technically covered by the rule but genuinely unable to satisfy it on paper. That gap between eligibility and paperwork is precisely the mechanism behind the headline concern for this age group: not a shortage of willingness to work, but a shortage of time to prove it before a benefit gets cut.
Exemptions That Narrowed Along With the Age Limit
The same law tightened several exemptions that used to shield vulnerable ABAWDs regardless of age. State guidance issued to caseworkers, including an October 2025 policy transmittal from Maryland’s Department of Human Services, confirms that automatic exceptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults who aged out of foster care were eliminated, and that the caregiver exemption was narrowed from a parent of a child under 18 to a parent of a child age 13 or younger. Exemptions that remain in place include a documented physical or mental limitation, pregnancy, and participation in a drug or alcohol treatment program. For someone newly caught between an exemption that no longer applies and a work requirement that now does, the practical difference often comes down to whether the right form reaches a caseworker before a state’s three-month clock runs out, a distinction that has nothing to do with whether that person is actually willing or able to work. For a worker in their early 60s only a few years from Medicare eligibility, losing food assistance over a missed reporting deadline lands at a particularly vulnerable point in a household budget already strained by fixed income and rising costs.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
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Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
