Minnesota is set to send summer grocery benefits to hundreds of thousands of low-income children, backed by a $3.84 million federal grant from the USDA that funds the state's administration of the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer program.
The program, known as Summer EBT, puts $40 per month on an EBT card for each eligible child during the summer months, roughly $120 per child over the course of the summer, to be spent on groceries. It targets children who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. The federal grant, effective October 1, covers the infrastructure costs the state incurs to verify eligibility, issue cards, and run outreach, not the benefit dollars themselves.
What makes Minnesota's program potentially stand out nationally is a 2023 state law, signed by Governor Tim Walz, that made school meals free for all K-12 students regardless of income. Because Summer EBT eligibility flows from school meal eligibility, that policy decision dramatically widened the pool of children who qualify for summer benefits. Estimates put the number of eligible Minnesota children at 400,000 to 500,000, a far larger share of the state's roughly 900,000 K-12 students than most states would see under traditional free-and-reduced-price eligibility rules alone.
The program was permanently authorized by Congress in late 2022, building on lessons from the pandemic-era Pandemic EBT program, which demonstrated that delivering nutrition benefits through existing EBT infrastructure was both feasible and effective at scale. Summer 2024 was the first operational year nationally, with USDA reporting the program reached about 21 million children across 37 states and several tribal nations. Thirteen states, most with Republican governors, declined to participate, citing administrative costs or opposition to expanding food assistance. The USDA has been [distributing administrative grants to participating states](articles/usda-sends-273m-to-keep-low-income-kids-fed-this-summer) to help defray those costs.
The October 2025 grant date places this award at the start of federal fiscal year 2026, suggesting it supports the program's third summer cycle. Minnesota's Department of Education, which administers child nutrition programs, manages Summer EBT in coordination with the Department of Human Services, which runs the state's existing SNAP EBT infrastructure.
Advocates have continued to push the state to reach harder-to-find populations, including immigrant and refugee families, children in rural areas far from summer meal sites, and Native American communities on tribal lands. Those same structural barriers, the difficulty of getting to a physical meal site at a fixed time, were precisely what motivated the shift to grocery card benefits in the first place.
The broader future of Summer EBT remains unsettled. Farm Bill reauthorization discussions in Congress have included proposals to scale back or restructure the program, meaning how many summers Minnesota can count on this funding stream is not yet certain.
