Universal School Meals Program Act of 2026

Key Points

• This bill would make breakfast and lunch free for every student enrolled in schools participating in federal meal programs, eliminating the reduced-price category and removing the need for families to submit income applications.
• Schools would be banned from meal shaming, including segregating children, using special tokens, or publishing lists of names. The bill also prohibits schools from collecting unpaid meal debt and creates a federal program to reimburse schools for all existing delinquent meal debt.
• The federal government would pay schools $3.28 per free breakfast and $5.42 per free lunch, adjusted annually for inflation. Schools sourcing at least 25% of their food from local farms within 250 miles would receive extra payments of $0.30 per lunch and $0.21 per breakfast.
• The bill extends free meals to summer food programs and afterschool care, and boosts the Summer EBT benefit to $60 per child per month. All children would be eligible to participate in the summer food service program regardless of income.
• Because free/reduced-price lunch data is currently used as a poverty measure for many federal programs, the bill creates a new survey-based system and direct certification process to identify economically disadvantaged students for Title I funding and other purposes.