What Is the SNAP Deposit Schedule?
The short answer: SNAP benefits load onto your EBT card once a month, on a date your state assigns from a rule — the last digits of your case number, a digit of your Social Security number, the first letter of your last name, or a single fixed day for everyone. Windows run from as narrow as one day (Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, Rhode Island) to as wide as Florida's 28-day spread. Your deposit day almost never changes month to month, and weekends and holidays do not move it.
This page is the national reference for those schedules as of October 2026. It carries the federal issuance baseline from USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, corrected where states have lawfully changed their systems — most notably Connecticut, which overhauled its deposit schedule in March 2026 and still shows the old dates on most websites, including stale copies of the federal table itself. If you want your state's full detail — income limits, benefit math, and application steps alongside deposit dates — every state name in the table links to its dedicated guide.
How States Decide Your Deposit Day
Every state falls into one of four systems, and knowing which one yours uses tells you where to look for your date. The systems matter because they answer different questions: two neighbors with identical incomes can be paid on different days purely because of which digits or letters their cases happen to carry. Knowing the system also tells you what to check first when a deposit seems late — a case-number state means matching your case number, an SSN state means the head of household card, and a fixed-date state means the calendar itself.
Case-number digits. The largest group of states keys your day to digits of your SNAP case number — the last digit (California, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma), the last two (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi), or in Florida's famous version, the 9th and 8th digits read backwards with the 10th dropped, which spreads deposits across all 28 days of the month.
Social Security digits. Another group uses a digit of the head of household's SSN — the last digit (Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon), the last two (Tennessee, New Mexico), or Wisconsin's eighth digit. Your benefit day follows the person whose name anchors the case, so a new head of household can move your date.
Last-name letters. Alphabetical systems run from Connecticut's old three-band map (retired in March 2026) to Arizona's thirteen-day A-to-Z ladder and Maryland's three-letter bands. These systems spread households evenly because surnames distribute fairly predictably.
Fixed dates and oddballs. A few states pay everyone on one day — the 1st in Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, and Rhode Island; the 5th in New Hampshire; the 10th in South Dakota. Then there are the states that mix inputs: Missouri combines birth month with last name, Nevada uses the last digit of your birth year, Maine uses the last digit of your birthday, and Pennsylvania works on business days with county-level cycle rules.
SNAP Deposit Dates for All 50 States (October 2026)
The table below lists the deposit window and the rule that sets your exact day in every state, plus the District of Columbia. Windows mean the first and last possible day — your personal day inside that window comes from the rule in the third column. The federal baseline comes from USDA's Monthly Issuance Schedule, and where a state has lawfully superseded it, the table says so.
| State | Deposit window | How your day is set |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 4th–23rd | Last two digits of case number |
| Alaska | 1st | Fixed date for all households |
| Arizona | 1st–13th | First letter of last name — A/B on the 1st through Y/Z on the 13th |
| Arkansas | 4th–13th | Last digit of SSN, eight cycles |
| California | 1st–10th | Last digit of case number |
| Colorado | 1st–10th | Last digit of SSN |
| Connecticut | 1st–8th | Changed March 2026: last two digits of Client ID (Public Act 24-82) — previously 1st–3rd by last name; most sites still show the old map |
| Delaware | 2nd–23rd | First letter of last name, 22-day spread |
| District of Columbia | 1st–10th | First letter of last name |
| Florida | 1st–28th | 9th and 8th digits of case number read backwards, 10th digit dropped |
| Georgia | 5th–23rd | Last two digits of client ID |
| Hawaii | 3rd and 5th | First letter of last name, two cycles |
| Idaho | 1st–10th | Last digit of birth year |
| Illinois | 1st–10th (newer cases) | Last digit of head-of-household ID; cases certified before late 2017 keep legacy dates up to the 20th |
| Indiana | 5th–23rd | First letter of last name |
| Iowa | 1st–10th | First letter of last name |
| Kansas | 1st–10th | First letter of last name |
| Kentucky | 1st–19th | Last digit of case number |
| Louisiana | 1st–23rd | Last digit of SSN; elderly and disabled households 1st–4th |
| Maine | 10th–14th | Last digit of the head of household's birthday |
| Maryland | 4th–23rd | First three letters of last name |
| Massachusetts | 1st–14th | Last digit of SSN, ten bands that skip the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th |
| Michigan | 3rd–21st | Last digit of the recipient's ID number |
| Minnesota | 4th–13th | Last digit of case number |
| Mississippi | 4th–21st | Last two digits of case number |
| Missouri | 1st–22nd | Birth month plus first letter of last name |
| Montana | 2nd–6th | Last digit of the eligibility-system case number, five-day cycle loading at 12:01 AM |
| Nebraska | 1st–5th | Last digit of head-of-household SSN |
| Nevada | 1st–10th | Last digit of birth year |
| New Hampshire | 5th | Fixed date for all households |
| New Jersey | 1st–5th | 7th digit of case number; Warren County pays everyone on the 1st |
| New Mexico | 1st–20th | Last two digits of SSN |
| New York | 1st–10th (upstate) | Last digit of case number; the five NYC boroughs run a separate schedule |
| North Carolina | 3rd–21st | Last digit of the primary cardholder's SSN |
| North Dakota | 1st | Fixed date for all households |
| Ohio | 2nd–20th | Last digit of SNAP case number |
| Oklahoma | 1st–10th | Last digit of SNAP case number |
| Oregon | 1st–9th | Last digit of SSN |
| Pennsylvania | 1st–10th business day | Last digit of the 7-digit case record number; counties run one, two, or ten cycles |
| Rhode Island | 1st | Fixed date for all households |
| South Carolina | 1st–10th | Last digit of SNAP case number |
| South Dakota | 10th | Fixed date for all households |
| Tennessee | 1st–20th | Last two digits of head-of-household SSN, twenty bands |
| Texas | 16th–28th (cases certified after June 2020) | Last two digits of the EDG number; older cases pay 1st–15th on the same rule |
| Utah | 5th, 11th, or 15th | First letter of last name |
| Vermont | 1st | Fixed date for all households |
| Virginia | 1st–7th | Last digits of case number |
| Washington | 1st–20th | Issued across the window; your exact day is on your award letter |
| West Virginia | 1st–9th | First letter of last name |
| Wisconsin | 1st–15th | Eighth digit of the client's SSN |
| Wyoming | 1st–4th | First letter of last name |
Territories follow their own rules — Guam spreads the 1st through the 10th by SSN last digit, and the U.S. Virgin Islands pay everyone on the 1st. Because state legislatures occasionally rewrite these systems (Connecticut's overhaul is the freshest example), treat your approval letter and your state agency as the final word, and use this table as the map.
Why Deposit Schedules Exist — and Why They Vary So Much
Staggered issuance is a deliberate design, not an accident. When every household in a state shops in the same three-day window, grocery chains face a demand spike that empties shelves, crowds stores, and strains checkout lines in exactly the neighborhoods SNAP serves. Spreading deposits across a week or a month flattens that spike — a rationale Connecticut's legislature cited explicitly when it passed Public Act 24-82, noting the rush that came from paying nearly every household in the first three days. States that moved to wider windows did so for the same operational reason, which is why the national map looks like a patchwork: each state chose its own way to spread demand, keyed to whatever identifier its eligibility system already carried.
The identifier choice is rarely random. States that pay by case-number digit lean on the number their system assigns at approval; states that use SSN digits borrow an identifier every household already has; last-name systems were common in earlier EBT rollouts because alphabetical bands are easy to publish on a poster. Fixed-date states trade precision for simplicity — everyone knows the money arrives on the 1st, and retailer logistics in states like Alaska and Vermont are built around that certainty. None of these choices affects how much you receive; the day changes when you shop, not what the card holds.
Two practical habits follow from the design. First, your deposit day is attached to your case — so keep your case number handy (it is printed on every notice and usually visible in your state portal), because that number unlocks the right row in the table above. Second, when your case changes — a new certification, a move, a reopened case — assume your date may change with it and check rather than assume. The households most often surprised by a "missing" deposit are the ones whose case number changed quietly.
The Connecticut Change Almost Every Site Gets Wrong
On March 1, 2026, Connecticut stopped paying nearly all of its SNAP households inside the first three days of the month. Public Act 24-82 — a state law passed in 2024 and implemented by the Department of Social Services — spread issuance across the first eight days, keyed to the last two digits of each household's Client ID, the case number printed on DSS notices and visible in the myDSS portal. Cash assistance through Temporary Family Assistance moved the opposite way: everyone's cash now lands on the 1st.
| Last two digits of Client ID | New deposit day (since March 2026) |
|---|---|
| 00 – 12 | 1st |
| 13 – 24 | 2nd |
| 25 – 37 | 3rd |
| 38 – 49 | 4th |
| 50 – 62 | 5th |
| 63 – 74 | 6th |
| 75 – 87 | 7th |
| 88 – 99 | 8th |
Before the change, the day rode on the first letter of your last name — A through F on the 1st, G through N on the 2nd, O through Z on the 3rd. That old map still circulates widely: the federal issuance table USDA publishes was last updated in July 2024 and still describes Connecticut the old way, and sites that copied it never caught the correction. If your Connecticut deposit stopped matching what a website told you, the Client ID table above — straight from DSS — is the one that governs.
The Three Documents That Tell You Your Exact Day
Tables like the one above give you the system; three documents give you your personal day inside it. Your approval notice — the letter your agency sends when benefits start or change — states your monthly amount and, in most states, your issuance day in plain language. Your state portal shows the same information electronically: Florida's MyACCESS, Connecticut's myDSS, Arizona's Health-e-Arizona Plus, and their counterparts elsewhere display case details and real-time balances once you log in. And your EBT card itself matters more than people expect — the customer-service number on the back routes to a line that reads your balance and, in many states, your next deposit date after you enter your card number.
Keep one of the three close at hand during any schedule transition. When a state changes its system — as Connecticut did in March 2026 — agencies mail notices to every affected household, but mail gets lost and portals get ignored. Checking your balance against your expected date, once a month on the day itself, catches problems while they are still easy to fix: a failed posting is correctable within days, while a unnoticed missed deposit discovered weeks later turns into a much longer conversation with customer service.
Weekends, Holidays, and Late Deposits
Most states load benefits on the scheduled calendar day no matter what day of the week it falls on — the 4th arrives on the 4th whether it is a Wednesday or a Saturday, because EBT processing runs automatically rather than through open offices. Pennsylvania is the notable exception, issuing on business days and sliding around weekends and holidays by design. A few processing notes cover nearly every state: benefits usually post early in the day, but heavy issuance days at the start of the month can delay individual batches by hours; balances roll over month to month, so a deposit that lands later than expected never erases the prior balance; and a deposit that is genuinely missing — 24 hours past your scheduled day with a balance that has not moved — is a customer-service call, not a reason to reapply.
First-Month Proration: Why Your First Deposit Can Look Small
Newly approved households usually notice that month one pays less than month two, and the reason is timing rather than a mistake. SNAP pays from the date your application is approved, not the date the month starts, so if your case clears on the 20th your first issuance covers only the rest of that month — prorated to the days remaining. Your full monthly amount begins with the next complete month, on your regular schedule. The prorated amount follows the same daily-division math states use statewide: the monthly allotment divided across the days of that month, paid only for the days you were certified. Because the divisor differs month to month, two households approved on the same date in different months can receive slightly different first deposits — the second month is where the ordinary amount settles in. The same logic explains why a mid-year change in your case — an address move between states, a reopened case after a closure, a new case number — can reset your deposit day: the day follows the case, and a new case gets a new identifier.
Didn't Get Your Deposit? Work Through This Checklist
Start by confirming the day itself. Match your case number, SSN, or last name against the table above — and if you are in Connecticut, match your Client ID against the new eight-day table, because the old three-day map is the single most common source of false "missing deposit" reports since March 2026. Then check your balance the same way you would check a bank account: the number on the back of your EBT card reaches your state's EBT customer-service line, most state portals (Florida's MyACCESS, Connecticut's myDSS, Arizona's Health-e-Arizona Plus) show real-time balances, and every receipt from a SNAP purchase prints your remaining balance.
If the day is confirmed and the balance has not moved a full day past schedule, call the EBT number rather than the general SNAP line — card-level issues like holds, replacements, and failed postings live there. A card that was never received, a PIN that was never set, or a card reported lost can all swallow a deposit that technically loaded. Households that moved states should also remember that benefits do not transfer: close the old case, apply in the new state, and expect the new state's schedule from its first issuance.
For the rest of the picture — what the money buys, how the amounts are calculated, and why amounts change — our calculators estimate your monthly benefit from your actual income and deductions, and the state guides behind every link in the table carry each state's income limits and application steps. If your amount changed rather than your date, why SNAP benefits go down walks through the eleven reasons amounts decrease and the fixes for each.
