I’m writing this on Friday, Halloween Day, because I’ll be leaving tonight and out of town next week. If nothing changes between now and the time you’re reading this, with the federal government shutdown, many of your customers may find themselves with a dilemma.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments, commonly referred to as food stamps, are scheduled to end on November 1. If you live in a state that won’t be supplementing the SNAP program with state funds (such as my home state of North Carolina), you probably have some customers who will be impacted.

Difficult choices

Unless your customer base is more affluent than most, you may have customers who will struggle to choose between buying food and paying their utility bill.

This is likely to result in more customers paying late or requesting additional time to pay. How will you deal with this?

Plan ahead now

I advise planning ahead now for how you will handle customers who claim a hardship because they have lost their SNAP benefits.

Will you relax your extension policy and allow more extensions? You do have an extension policy, don’t you…? Will you suspend cut-offs for non-payment, as many utilities did during COVID?

Sooner, rather than later, is the time to decide on a policy for how your utility will handle these situations and communicate it to your entire staff, so your customers are presented with a unified message.

What are you planning to do?

Has your utility made plans for how you will deal with customers who claim they can’t pay their utility bill because of lost SNAP benefits? Please let me know by emailing me at gary@utilityinformationpipeline.com.

© 2025 Gary Sanders