Alaska Has the Nation's Worst SNAP Error Rate — and a Bill Coming

Alaska has the worst food-stamp error rate in the country — and under a new federal law, that distinction is about to come with a bill.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual SNAP payment-error rates Wednesday, the first set of numbers that will be used to decide how much states must repay for getting benefits wrong. The national rate was 10.62%, already well above the 6% line Congress drew between acceptable and costly. Alaska's problem is in a different league. In the most recent fully reported year, Alaska posted the highest error rate of any state at 24.66%, against a national average near 11% — and it has held that last-place ranking for three years in a row.

Under the budget law passed in 2025, states at or above 6% will have to cover a share of their own SNAP benefit costs — 5% to 15%, rising with the error rate — with the obligation hitting as soon as October 2027. At Alaska's rate, the state would land in the top penalty tier. SNAP benefits are entirely federal dollars today, so this is a genuinely new cost the state would have to absorb out of its own budget.

How Alaska got here is its own story, and it isn't mainly fraud. State officials have said the error rate is so high because the Division of Public Assistance kept food assistance flowing even when paperwork was missing, as it dug out of a massive backlog — and most of Alaska's errors were overpayments, not denials. The improvement has actually been dramatic: Alaska's rate fell from a staggering 60% in 2023 to about 25% — but "best in years" still means worst in the nation.

There's one twist that works in Alaska's favor, and it's named after the state. To win Senate votes, Congress wrote in what's been nicknamed the "Alaska carveout" — a provision letting states with exceptionally high error rates (above 13.34% in fiscal 2025) delay the cost-sharing requirement by up to two additional years, as late as 2030. Alaska is one of the few jurisdictions whose error rate is bad enough to qualify for the reprieve — a perverse result that, as critics have noted, rewards the worst-performing states and penalizes those that cleaned up faster.

"These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP," Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said, urging states "regardless of political leadership" to prioritize needy families and taxpayers.

For Alaska, the stakes sit on both ends of the same system: thousands of residents who already wait months for food aid they're legally owed, and a state now on the hook to either fix its error rate or start paying the federal government for getting it wrong.