The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is released annually by the U.S. Census Bureau based on data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC). The SPM accounts for many sources of government assistance, including benefits provided by the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which subsidizes lunches served in public and nonprofit private schools. When the NSLP is operating normally, all student lunches are either partially or fully subsidized. The value of this subsidy is included as a resource in the SPM, traditionally calculated using per-meal reimbursement rates for a 179-day school year.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response has changed school lunch provision. The SPM used alternative methods to value school lunch benefits for both 2020 and 2021 to account for those changes (Shrider 2021; Shrider 2022).  Additional changes to the NSLP in 2022 necessitate another adjustment to the method.

This paper describes the NSLP and how school lunch provision changed in 2022. It then describes the updated method for calculating and assigning school lunch values in the 2022 SPM. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the new method.