Community Eligibility: The Key to Hunger-Free Schools 2026

Any school district, group of schools in a district, or school with 25 percent or more “identified students” – children who are certified eligible for free school meals without a school meals application – can choose to participate. Identified students are children who are eligible for free school meals due to participating in another means-tested federal program, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or in most states, Medicaid, or because they are in a specific eligibility category, such as being in foster care, Head Start, or are experiencing homelessness.

Rather than collecting school meal applications, CEP schools are reimbursed based on the percentage of students that are automatically eligible for free school meals without an application, called the identified student percentage (ISP).

Identified students are a subset of children who would be eligible for free or reduced-price school meals if the school collected meal applications. For that reason, a multiplier of 1.6 is applied to the ISP to calculate the percentage of meals reimbursed at the federal free rate. The remainder of meals served are reimbursed at the lower, federal paid rate.

The 2025-2026 school year saw the lowest rate of CEP growth in the program’s history. Without additional investments in CEP, including raising the multiplier, many schools, especially those with lower ISPs, simply cannot adopt CEP. As a result, far too many students are still missing out on the educational and health benefits of free school meals.

CEP adoption is highest in states with policies that support school nutrition finances, including the nine Healthy School Meals for All states and Oregon, which provides state funding to help offset the cost of implementing CEP in schools that receive less than full federal free reimbursement. Outside of state policies, this year’s growth was largely driven by states initiating Medicaid Direct Certification in the 2024–2025 school year (Maine, New Jersey, Idaho, and Arkansas).

Directly certifying children as eligible for free school meals based on their participation in another means-tested program, such as SNAP or Medicaid, is the basis for CEP eligibility and federal reimbursement.

While most students are directly certified for free school meals through household participation in SNAP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Medicaid Direct Certification Demonstration Project has helped link eligible children to free or reduced-price school meals, and has supported schools’ ability to implement CEP. As of the 2025–2026 school year, 44 states use Medicaid and household income data to directly certify children for free or reduced-price school meals. This mechanism – Medicaid Direct Certification – is a catalyst for CEP adoption, increasing school’s ISPs and, in turn, the amount of federal reimbursement CEP schools receive.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia decreased the total number of schools implementing CEP in 2025–2026 compared to 2024–2025. While declining student enrollment and resulting school closures contributed to these losses, low or decreasing ISPs and longstanding barriers to CEP participation—particularly inadequate federal reimbursement—likely also played a role. These challenges will be compounded by the 2025 budget reconciliation law (H.R. 1), which enacted severe and unprecedented cuts to SNAP that have already caused millions of people to lose nutrition benefits, threatening schools’ ability to qualify for and sustain CEP participation.