Community Data Dashboard

What is SNAP?

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps people buy food. Benefits go to the whole household. The amount depends on income, expenses, and household size. Everyone who lives together and shares meals counts as one household.

How we count:

We count each person on an approved case who lives in the home and receives benefits. We count each person once, even if they got benefits in more than one month during the time shown.

What is cash assistance?

Cash assistance provides monthly payments to help cover basic needs. Colorado Works (also called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) serves families with children. Adult Financial serves adults who are older, blind, or have a disability.

How we count:

Benefits go to the household. We count each person on an approved case who lives in the home and applied for the program. We count each person once, even if they got benefits in more than one month during the time shown.

What is Medicaid?

Medicaid provides health coverage for people with low income. Unlike food and cash assistance, each person qualifies on their own. But more than one person on the same case can qualify. So the dashboard shows both individual and household counts.

How we count:

We count anyone who was approved for Medicaid and had coverage for at least one day during the time shown.

What’s the difference?

When someone applies for benefits, they apply for their whole household, not just themselves. A household can be one person or a group of people who live together and share resources. The dashboard shows both:

• Individuals — the number of people who received benefits.
• Households — the number of cases that received benefits. Each case is one household. It has one head of household, usually the person who applied.

Larger households can qualify for more benefits than smaller ones.

How we count vs. how the State of Colorado counts:

The state of Colorado usually uses “point-in-time” data. Ours is cumulative. Point-in-time data is a snapshot of a single moment. For example, it shows how many people receive SNAP in one month. Cumulative data adds up everything over a period of time. That is how we show data here. For example, we show how many people received SNAP benefits during all of 2025.