Every June, a particular piece of mail starts landing in low-income households across New York: a plain envelope from the state, sometimes holding a debit-style card, sometimes just a letter confirming that a card already in your kitchen drawer is about to be reloaded. The amount is modest and fixed—$120 per school-age child–and is meant to cover the cost of groceries during the months when school breakfast and lunch are not available. The program is called Summer EBT, or SUN Bucks, and, unlike the summer meal sites that serve food at parks, schools, and community centers, this benefit asks nothing of a family at the moment of use beyond a trip to the grocery store. It is cash, on a card, spent like SNAP.
That distinction matters. Congregate meal sites require a child to show up, on time, at a fixed location—a significant barrier for working parents, kids without transportation, and neighborhoods where the nearest site is a bus ride away. Summer EBT was designed as the complement: a way to reach the children site-based models don’t. But the cash benefit carries its own, quieter barrier to access —one that has less to do with showing up and more to do with whether the state even knows your child exists.
How the Benefit Works
Summer EBT became a permanent federal program in 2024, and New York was among the first wave of states to launch it by building on the data systems left behind by pandemic-era P-EBT. In New York, it is run entirely by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA)—not by county social services offices or, in New York City, by the Human Resources Administration (HRA). For 2026, OTDA began issuing benefits on June 16, with eligibility letters mailed throughout the spring and early summer.
Most families never have to do a thing to receive this benefit. A child is automatically enrolled if they’re between the ages of 6 and 16 and their household received SNAP, Temporary Assistance, or Medicaid at any point during the eligibility window—for 2026, the period running July 1, 2025, through September 8, 2026—or if their school has certified them for free or reduced-price meals. Crucially, immigration status is irrelevant: undocumented families are eligible, and receiving the benefit does not count toward a public charge determination. Pilot research that preceded the national rollout found that this approach cut child food insecurity by about a third among participating kids while also increasing how much produce and whole grains they ate.
The Numbers
Based on the numbers, New York’s program looks like a clear success. In its first year, the state issued more than $240 million to the families of more than two million school-age children. In 2025, its second year, the figure was roughly $250 million for more than two million children in every corner of the state. On the national level, summer 2025 saw 37 states participate, but 13 declined, which, by the Food Research & Action Center’s count, left an estimated 9.9 million eligible children without access to the benefit because they live in states that opted out.
New York is not one of those states. Its gap is subtler, and it lives inside the eligibility rules themselves.
The Gap Hiding Inside a Success
The trouble starts with a policy New York is rightly proud of. Beginning with the 2025–26 school year, the state required universal free school meals, with eligible schools—those where at least 25 percent of students are directly certified for free meals through programs like SNAP or Medicaid—operating under the federal Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). Under CEP, every student eats free, and no one fills out a household income application—a genuine reduction in stigma and paperwork. New York City public schools have worked this way for years.
But Summer EBT runs on exactly the income data that universal meals make unnecessary. As OTDA states plainly, attending a CEP school is not enough to qualify a child for the summer benefit. A student at a universal-meals school is auto-enrolled only if their family is on SNAP, Temporary Assistance, or Medicaid, or if they were directly certified some other way. The OTDA guidance offers a telling example: a ten-year-old at a CEP school where everyone eats free, whose family receives none of those benefits, must have a parent submit an application to get a dime from Summer EBT. Hunger Solutions New York has flagged the same mechanism: providing free meals to all students does not, by itself, establish Summer EBT eligibility.
The children most likely to slip through this crack are the ones the safety net always strains to reach: working-poor families earning just above the SNAP line, mixed-status and immigrant households wary of filling out government forms, and families new to the program who never learned that a separate application exists. The pool that must apply is small relative to the millions enrolled automatically, but it is precisely the pool least equipped to navigate an application window, and the establishment of statewide universal meals may slowly enlarge it as fewer families will ever have to submit an income form to begin with.
The program’s single-agency design adds another layer of friction. Because OTDA runs everything, county offices and HRA cannot answer questions or look up a case, so a parent who walks into an office with which they are already familiar expecting help will get turned toward a state helpline instead. It is the same problem that plagues so much of the emergency food system: eligibility is not the barrier; the path to claiming it is.
Advocates spend each summer trying to close that gap. Last August, for instance, Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York, urged families to check eligibility before the deadline: ‘It’s not too late to enroll.’ But this is exactly the kind of message that has to be repeated precisely because the benefit does not announce itself to everyone it could reach. And that same organization’s survey found that 86 percent of New York City households said food costs were rising faster than their income.
Friction After the Card Arrives
Even reaching a family does not solve the problem. Summer EBT benefits expire 122 days after they’re issued, at which point unspent funds vanish from the card. Benefits stolen through card skimming cannot be replaced—a loss OTDA now warns about directly, advising families to freeze their cards between purchases. And because cards and letters are mailed to the address on file, a family that has moved or whose data was entered incorrectly can be fully eligible and still never receive anything. For a population that moves often and is hard to reach by mail, accurate data is not simply a clerical detail; it is the difference between $120 and nothing.
This year New York’s Summer EBT program will again move a quarter of a billion dollars to roughly two million children, and most of them will not have had to fill out a form. That automation is the program’s great strength. And also its blind spot. A system that enrolls children from data it already holds will, by definition, miss the children on which it has no data—and in a state that has just made it unnecessary for most families to report their income to a school, that blind spot is poised to grow, not shrink, unless the outreach grows with it.
