13.7% of U.S. Households Are Food Insecure

13.7%. That's the share of U.S. households that couldn't reliably put enough food on the table in 2024.

That's 18.3 million households. According to the USDA's final Household Food Security in the United States report, it's the highest rate recorded since 2014. Progress made during the post-pandemic economic recovery has reversed.

Within that group, 5.4% of households — 7.2 million families — experienced very low food security, meaning people cut meals or skipped eating entirely because they couldn't afford food. In roughly 318,000 families, children went without adequate food.

Who's Getting Hit

The damage concentrates in specific communities.

According to the Heritage Foundation's analysis of USDA data, nearly 40% of households below the poverty line were food insecure in 2024. Single mothers, Black households, and Hispanic households all face above-average rates. 18.4% of households with children were food insecure.

Geography shows stark variation. Arkansas sits at 19.4% food insecurity. North Dakota is at 9.0%. The gap depends heavily on zip code.

The NY Federal Reserve flagged this trend separately. According to The Hill's reporting on a NY Fed analysis, the increase in households struggling to afford food since 2020 has been described as "remarkable" — not typical language from central bankers.

Why It Got This Bad

Three factors converged without intervention from Washington.

First, expanded pandemic-era SNAP benefits expired in 2023, according to Food Chain Magazine. Millions of households lost monthly food assistance, and wages didn't fill the gap.

Second, grocery prices stayed stubbornly high. Inflation hit lower-income families hardest because food and housing consume a larger share of their budgets.

Third, wage growth hasn't kept pace. The Hill reported that 8 of the 10 most common jobs in America — occupations covering more than 30 million workers — pay below the national average wage. Retail clerks, home health aides, food service workers: the economy depends on them but doesn't pay them enough to eat reliably.

The Government Is Now Flying Blind

In September, the USDA announced it was terminating future editions of this report. According to CSIS analyst Caitlin Welsh, the USDA claimed the reports were "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous" and did "nothing more than fear monger."

This report has been published every year since the mid-1990s. It's the only consistent, national, public measurement of domestic food insecurity that breaks down results by race, income, geography, and household type. According to CSIS, no other report provides the same data to the public and policymakers. There is no replacement.

Killing this report doesn't eliminate hunger. It only removes public measurement of it.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

Left-leaning outlets are treating this as a Trump administration scandal. The structural problems — stagnant wages for low-skill jobs, SNAP cliffs, rising housing costs — predate this administration and stretch back to 2020, per the NY Fed.

Right-leaning coverage has largely ignored the story. Fiscal conservatism is supposed to mean accountability for outcomes. Declining to address the fact that 18 million households are food insecure isn't fiscal conservatism.

The USDA's decision to kill the report is a government transparency failure. If the data looked good, they'd publish it. Bureaucracies don't terminate 25-year data series because numbers make them look great.

What This Means for Real People

The families showing up at food banks are the checkout clerk at your grocery store, the home health aide looking after your grandmother, the fast food worker ringing up your lunch order.

Eight of the ten most common jobs pay below the national average wage. One in eight households can't consistently afford food. And the federal government just stopped counting.