About Food Stamp Calc
Food Stamp Calc is a free, independent estimator for SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still called food stamps by most people who use it.
Food Stamp Calc Editorial Team · published · verified
Why it exists
People usually look up a SNAP estimate at a stressful moment: a job ended, hours were cut, a parent moved in, a letter arrived with a number that doesn’t look right. The official sources are accurate but scattered — a federal memo for the maximum benefit, a separate chart for each state’s income limit, a state manual for the utility allowance — and most online calculators skip the parts that change the answer most, like the shelter deduction, or quietly use last year’s figures. We built one tool that does the full federal calculation with each state’s own inputs, shows every line as a receipt, and says plainly when a figure could not be verified.
Who we are
The site is written and maintained by the Food Stamp Calc Editorial Team, part of a small independent publisher that also runs other free calculators for government formulas. We are not a government agency, a law firm or a benefits enrollment company, and we are not paid by any state, retailer or app to send people anywhere. There are no ads and no affiliate links. We do not name individual authors because no single person signs off the numbers; the checks are described on the editorial policy page and every number links to the document it came from.
What the calculator can and cannot do
It can show, line by line, how the federal SNAP formula treats your household for October 2026 through September 2027, using the maximum benefits and deductions USDA published on August 21, 2026, your state’s gross income limit and asset rule from the FNS broad-based eligibility chart, and your state’s utility allowance. As of this release 8 of 51 jurisdictions have a utility allowance we could verify as current; the rest are clearly labelled.
It cannot decide eligibility. Only your state agency can, after checking documents, household membership, citizenship and work-rule status. Expect your first month to be smaller because it is prorated from the application date.
Your privacy
Everything you type stays in your browser. The share button puts your inputs in the part of the link after “#”, which browsers never send to a server. We count page views and whether a calculation happened, without cookies or IP addresses — see the privacy policy.
Contact
Found a wrong number or an outdated rule? Use the corrections form. Corrections are read by the editorial team and fixed figures are re-verified against the original source before release.