Do Universal Free School Meal Policies Increase Participation in U.S. School Breakfast and Lunch Programs?

This study asked whether federal and state Universal Free School Meal (UFSM) policies increased student participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP). Using school-level meal claims from 25 U.S. states between 2019 and 2024, the authors conducted a difference-in-difference analysis. They found that federal UFSM policies during the COVID-19 pandemic raised participation by 10 percentage points for lunches and 8 for breakfasts. When these policies ended, participation fell by roughly 12 and 10 points, respectively. States that continued UFSM programs maintained gains of 9–19 points for NSLP and 5–26 points for SBP.

The Policy Scientist's Perspective

This article provides timely and consequential evidence on the effects of Universal Free School Meal (UFSM) policies on participation in U.S. school nutrition programs. The policy issue is important not merely for its nutritional implications but for its relevance to education, inequality, and social welfare policy design. The data set, covering school-level meal claims from 25 states over multiple years, offers exceptional breadth and temporal depth. The authors employ a difference-in-difference design that credibly isolates policy effects by leveraging variation in both federal and state adoption timing. The resulting estimates—showing participation gains of roughly 9–19 percentage points—are both statistically and substantively meaningful. While generalizability is strongest within the U.S. federal context, the findings likely extend to other high-income systems with means-tested meal programs. By quantifying the sustained effects of UFSM beyond the pandemic, this article advances the empirical literature on universal benefits and food policy implementation more effectively than most recent work in this area.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Ramponi, F., Zhou, H., Gosliner, W., Ohri-Vachaspati, P., Orta-Aleman, D., Ritchie, L., Schwartz, M., Turner, L., Verguet, S., & Cohen, J. (2025). Universal free school meal policies and participation in the US National School Meal Programs. JAMA Pediatrics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.2301

Central Research Question

This study asks whether federal and state Universal Free School Meal (UFSM) policies increased participation in the U.S. National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP). It specifically evaluates how program participation changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the federal government temporarily introduced nationwide universal free school meals, and after the policy’s expiration, when several states adopted their own UFSM programs. The analysis seeks to estimate both the magnitude and persistence of these effects, determining whether free meal policies led to sustained increases in school meal participation and whether limited state expansions achieved comparable outcomes. The underlying policy question is whether making school meals universally free is an effective tool to improve nutrition access and reduce socioeconomic disparities in food security.

Previous Literature

Prior research has shown that access to free or reduced-price school meals improves dietary quality, attendance, and academic outcomes. Historically, participation in school meal programs has been constrained by eligibility rules that limit free meals to students from families earning less than 130% of the federal poverty line, and reduced-price meals to those between 130% and 185%. This tiered structure has left many near-poor families without access, while also introducing administrative burdens and stigma that discourage participation among eligible students. Earlier studies of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)—a component of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act allowing schools with high poverty rates to serve free meals to all students—found that CEP participation raised meal uptake, improved diet quality, and increased attendance. However, the research was geographically limited, and much of it relied on pre-pandemic data.

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented policy experiment by suspending means testing for all students nationwide. Prior analyses of this federal waiver period suggested large increases in participation, but these studies lacked post-pandemic follow-up data to assess persistence or state-level heterogeneity. Moreover, previous evaluations of universal meal programs often depended on observational cross-sectional methods or small samples, limiting causal inference. The present study distinguishes itself by exploiting variation in both the implementation and termination of the federal UFSM program and the staggered adoption of state-level programs. By doing so, it extends prior work by providing comparative evidence on federal versus state interventions and examining whether participation gains were retained after federal support ended.

Data

The study utilizes a comprehensive school-level panel data set covering meal claims from 2019 to 2024 across 25 states. Fourteen states implemented UFSM or related policies during this period, while eleven comparable states did not, serving as the control group. The dataset includes both the NSLP and SBP, with participation rates calculated as the number of meals served divided by student enrollment. Monthly data were collected for the months of September through December in each school year to ensure temporal consistency and to avoid pandemic-related school closures that affected the spring of 2020.

Data on school-level meal claims were obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to state departments of education, agriculture, or public health. These data were merged with the National Center for Education Statistics’ Elementary/Secondary Information System, which provided information on school characteristics including location (urban, suburban, rural), level (elementary, middle, high), enrollment, percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals, and racial/ethnic composition. The dataset encompasses both Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) schools and non-CEP schools, with baseline CEP status defined as of the 2019–2020 school year.

Coverage includes both “first-wave” states that implemented UFSM in 2022–2023 (California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Vermont) and “second-wave” states that implemented in 2023–2024 (Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico). States with limited expansions of free meals, such as Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and New Jersey, were also examined. The 11 control states—Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin—did not adopt UFSM policies during the study period. Overall, the dataset represents more than half of the U.S. public school population, making it one of the most comprehensive school nutrition datasets assembled to date.

Methods

The study uses a difference-in-difference (DiD) framework with linear mixed-effects models to estimate the impact of UFSM policies on participation in both the NSLP and SBP. The approach exploits the “natural experiment” created by the staggered introduction and removal of universal meal policies at the federal and state levels. By comparing within-school changes in participation before and after policy implementation to changes in schools without such policies, the DiD method isolates the effect of policy exposure from confounding temporal trends.

The analytic model includes nested random effects at both the school and state levels to account for unobserved heterogeneity and within-state correlation. Control variables include school level, geographic location, racial and ethnic composition, and socioeconomic status, defined by the proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Schools are stratified into high-, medium-, and low-SES subgroups. The baseline year, 2019–2020, represents the pre-UFSM period, while subsequent years capture the implementation of federal and state policies and their deimplementation.

The analysis proceeds in three main stages: (1) estimation of changes in participation associated with the federal UFSM policy (2020–2022), (2) evaluation of declines following federal deimplementation (2022–2023), and (3) assessment of state-level UFSM and limited-expansion policies (2022–2024). CEP and non-CEP schools are analyzed separately, since the former already provided free meals before UFSM and thus serve as an internal benchmark for program saturation. Sensitivity analyses include using pre-policy periods in intervention states as additional controls and testing for robustness to alternative model specifications.

Although the study is not a randomized controlled trial, its design provides strong quasi-experimental leverage by combining temporal and geographic variation in policy exposure. The difference-in-difference method is widely recognized for supporting causal inference when randomization is not feasible, particularly in policy evaluation contexts such as education and health.

Findings/Size Effects

Before the pandemic, participation averaged 25% for SBP and 45% for NSLP in non-CEP schools, compared with 48% and 72% respectively in CEP schools. During the federal UFSM period (2020–2022), non-CEP schools saw participation increases of 8 percentage points for SBP and 10 for NSLP. These effects were strongest among higher-income schools, which began with lower baseline participation. When the federal UFSM policy ended in 2022–2023, participation fell by 10 percentage points for breakfast and 12 for lunch, returning roughly to pre-pandemic levels in states that did not implement new policies.

In contrast, states that adopted UFSM policies maintained or expanded participation gains. In the first wave of UFSM states, non-CEP schools saw increases of 26 percentage points in SBP and 19 in NSLP relative to control states. These gains persisted into the following year, indicating sustained effects rather than short-term spikes. The second wave of states adopting UFSM in 2023–2024 experienced smaller but still significant gains of 5 points in SBP and 9 in NSLP participation.

CEP schools, already offering universal access, showed smaller changes—typically within ±5 percentage points—suggesting that UFSM primarily benefits schools transitioning from means-tested to universal coverage. States that pursued limited expansions (e.g., waiving reduced-price copayments) saw minimal impact: participation increased by only 2 percentage points in SBP and showed no significant change in NSLP.

The analysis also finds that schools with higher proportions of White or Asian students tended to experience greater increases in participation than those with larger minority populations, largely reflecting baseline differences in participation and socioeconomic composition. Rural schools and elementary schools exhibited higher overall participation than urban and high schools. Importantly, Community Eligibility Provision participation itself yielded large positive effects—roughly 23 percentage points for NSLP and 13 for SBP—underscoring the continued relevance of CEP as a policy mechanism for improving access in high-poverty areas.

The authors emphasize that UFSM policies reduced disparities in participation across income and racial groups, although variation remained. These effects are both statistically significant and substantively large in magnitude, consistent with prior evidence on the relationship between universal access and participation uptake.

Conclusion

The study provides robust empirical evidence that universal free school meal policies substantially increase participation in both breakfast and lunch programs. The federal UFSM initiative during the pandemic demonstrated large, immediate gains, and states that continued or adopted similar policies afterward sustained higher participation levels. These results suggest that eliminating means testing and offering universally free meals removes structural and psychological barriers to participation, thereby expanding access across socioeconomic groups.

Although the study is not based on randomized experiments, the difference-in-difference framework credibly isolates the causal impact of policy changes. The authors’ careful matching of states and inclusion of random effects enhances internal validity. The dataset’s coverage of more than half of U.S. public school students also supports strong external validity within similar high-income contexts. However, generalizability to countries with different administrative or nutritional systems may be limited.

From a methodological standpoint, this research represents one of the strongest quasi-experimental analyses of school meal participation to date. The findings are consistent with previous studies on the Community Eligibility Provision but extend them to a broader national scale and multi-year horizon. Substantively, the results highlight the significant behavioral response to removing price barriers in public benefit programs.

By leveraging the natural experiment created by the pandemic, this study provides a rare opportunity to quantify the effects of policy deimplementation and reimplementation—a feature seldom examined in nutrition or education policy. Its results offer important implications for policymakers evaluating the costs and benefits of maintaining UFSM programs and for researchers studying universal access policies more generally. The evidence indicates that UFSM policies not only boost participation but may help narrow diet-related and educational disparities, making this study one of the most consequential contributions to the school nutrition policy literature in recent years.