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The share of Americans reporting trouble affording food is rising this year amid persistently grocery costs, according to a recent report from Purdue University.

Roughly 14% of U.S. households reported food insecurity on average between January and October, up from 12.5% in 2024, according to the latest from Purdue's Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability.

While the prevalence of food insecurity around the U.S. fluctuates month to month, the overall rate had been declining since 2022, when an average of 15.4% of households were food insecure as inflation hit following the pandemic. 

Although the pace of inflation has declined since 2022, food insecurity is likely rising because food prices remain far above pre-pandemic levels, according to Poonam Gupta, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

"Even though inflation slowed a lot this year, we're nowhere near the amount that we were spending on food even just a couple of years ago," she said.

Gupta also said more Americans could struggle to put food on the table in 2026, with an estimated SNAP recipients potentially losing benefits due to new work requirements in the Republican-backed "big, beautiful" tax and spending bill signed in July by President Trump. 

The Purdue researchers define food insecurity as some members of a household at times not being able to afford a balanced meal, as well as occasionally having to skip a meal or eating less for financial reasons. 

In scrapping the USDA assessment of food insecurity, the Trump administration  in September that the survey was "redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous."

But researchers told Autos News that the government data was widely respected. Craig Gundersen, a Baylor University economics professor who has studied food insecurity for 30 years, called the USDA survey the "gold standard measure." 

Joseph Balagtas, director of Purdue's Center for Food Demand Analysis, said the school surveys about 1,200 adults a month, compared to 30,000 people yearly by the USDA. 

Even so, he said, Purdue's findings have generally mirrored federal food security data because participants are asked identical questions and because they use statistical methods to ensure their data is representative of the general population.