Gig Workers Are Now the Biggest Food Stamp Category

Food delivery and ride-hail apps have quietly become the largest single source of food stamp recipients in America. According to a federal watchdog report, gig workers now outrank the employees of any single company — including Walmart — in relying on government food assistance, a finding that reframes what platform work actually pays.

The report, released in July 2026 by the Government Accountability Office and commissioned by Senator Bernie Sanders, compared workers in eleven states between February 2020 and September 2025. It found that drivers for platforms such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart now make up the number one category of work among people receiving SNAP benefits, as reported by TechSpot. Five years ago, that category barely registered in the agency's data.

Amazon's workforce saw one of the steepest climbs. In the eleven states studied — home to nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population — 12,346 of the company's workers were enrolled in SNAP and 11,338 in Medicaid, nearly triple the totals from the agency's 2020 study. Amazon ranked second among traditional employers of assistance recipients, behind Walmart, according to the GAO's safety-net report.

Gig workers top the list as Amazon's share triples

Walmart still employs the most workers receiving assistance in the states examined — roughly fifteen and a half thousand on SNAP and sixteen thousand on Medicaid — but its share barely moved over five years, while Amazon's exploded. FedEx workers on Medicaid more than tripled over the same stretch, and its SNAP rolls nearly doubled, according to the analysis.

The speed of the rise is the real story: gig drivers also rank third for Medicaid representation, up from nowhere in 2020.

The national picture behind the gig workers

Zooming out from the eleven-state sample, the report reviewed 2024 Census data nationally. An estimated 13.8 million working adults were enrolled in Medicaid, up from about twelve million in 2020, while 10.6 million working adults lived in households receiving SNAP benefits, up from roughly nine million.

About two-thirds of those workers held full-time schedules, most worked for private-sector employers, and they clustered in transportation, restaurant and food preparation, and retail sales jobs, according to the report. These are not people working a few hours a week. They are largely full-time workers whose paychecks do not cover groceries and health coverage.

Companies push back on the findings

Amazon disputed the framing. A company spokesperson, Rachael Lighty, said eligibility for the programs is based on total household income and family size rather than individual wages, arguing that employers offering part-time schedules will naturally have more workers who qualify. Amazon also pointed to a one-billion-dollar pay investment announced late in 2025 that pushed average base pay above twenty-three dollars an hour, according to the company.

Walmart said it has raised starting wages by ninety-three percent since 2015 and that associates now average eighteen dollars an hour. DoorDash cited an in-house survey finding that a third of its gig workers said they did deliveries specifically to avoid signing up for government benefits. The gig industry group Flex said flexible work lets many people "bridge the gap" when they would otherwise need assistance, according to the trade group's statement.

Not every analyst reads the numbers as an indictment of employer pay. Peter Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research argued the pattern may partly reflect people already on Medicaid picking up gig work on the side, as reported by the outlet covering the study. "In other words, they're people on Medicaid who earn extra bucks by ride-sharing," he said, noting the programs were designed for people like them.

Why the squeeze hits young gig workers hardest

For young gig workers, the findings land on already thin ground. A 2020 Economic Policy Institute analysis found that twenty-nine percent of gig workers earned less than their state's minimum wage, about one in five said they had gone hungry because they could not afford enough food, and nearly a third had been unable to pay utility bills in full, according to the institute's research. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that only 19.9 percent of contingent workers received employer-provided health insurance, compared with about half of non-contingent workers — and most gig workers land on the wrong side of that divide.

The timing compounds the squeeze. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in the summer of 2025, expanded SNAP work requirements are already in effect, and a first-ever federal Medicaid work mandate begins in January in most states, requiring at least eighty hours a month of work, volunteering or training, as reported by Health Affairs. New Jersey's employer Medicaid assessment — between three hundred twenty-five and seven hundred twenty-five dollars per employee each year for large employers with fifty or more full-time workers on Medicaid — took effect July 1, 2026.

For readers, the practical takeaway is blunt. Gig platforms can be a flexible on-ramp to income, but the federal data shows the pay often does not cover the basics. Watch for state-level assessments like New Jersey's, which bill employers directly and may push platforms to raise pay or trim hours. And track the January Medicaid work mandate in your state — proving the eighty-hour threshold with irregular gig schedules could become its own bureaucratic second job.

The larger question the report raises is who pays when full-time work does not cover food and health care. Supporters of the new work requirements say they push people toward self-sufficiency, while critics warn the rules will mostly leave more people hungry or uninsured. Either way, the era of gig work has arrived at the federal ledger — and taxpayers are holding part of the bill. For gig workers watching from behind the wheel, the debate is anything but abstract. For more on how platform work pays, see our coverage of the record DoorDash settlement for underpaid delivery workers, and browse the Side Hustles topic page for the wider picture.