Free School Meals, Credit Access, and Household Debt
November 02, 2026
Summary
Free school meals may do more than feed children. The authors find that adults in neighborhoods with free school meals gain more access to credit with only a modest increase in severe delinquencies.
View PaperWorking Paper 2026-18
Abstract: Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serve free meals to every student without an application or a household means test, thus removing a recurring expense for many households. We examine the effect of CEP on the financial health of adults in those households, combining the staggered rollout of CEP with quarterly credit records from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel. Our results suggest that CEP draws households further into credit markets. Access to credit steps up when CEP arrives and stays higher, most durably in revolving credit, the kind that lets a household choose when to spend. The Equifax Risk Score barely moves. Severe delinquency rises modestly, but not among people observed continuously in the credit records before and after onset. The gains are largest where the fewest students were already eligible for free or reduced-price meals before CEP. Existing evidence shows that borrowing rises when nutrition assistance is withdrawn; our results suggest that it also rises when assistance is extended.
JEL classification: G51, I38, H53, I28
Key words: household finance, school lunches, consumer credit
https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2026-18
Orgul Ozturk is with the Darla Moore School of Business of the University of South Carolina, 1014 Greene Street, Columbia, SC 29208.
M. Melinda Pitts is research center director of the Center for Human Capital Studies in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The authors thank Benjamin Miller for excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System.
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