v5.2.1 - 8/3/2026

Overview:

• This release includes changes to State Median Income (SMI) estimates, and eligibility for CCDF, SNAP, and Pre-K.

Program Updates & Improvements:

• State Median Income table now has estimates for rule year 2026
  • CCDF Eligibility thresholds, for states that use SMI, now reflect rule year 2026 estimates
• Pre-K eligibility thresholds have been updated to reflect the most recently available rule year (2025).
  • Previously, the PRD only contained eligibility for rule year 2020 which was applied to all years. Now the PRD contains Pre-K eligibility for rule years 2024 and 2025.
    • Note: Rule years 2024 and 2025 have been populated in the PRD because in a future release, data in the PRD will be truncated to 2024. Additionally, Pre-K eligibility thresholds are sourced from the NIEER State Preschool Yearbook which is released in late April / early May every year and rules recorded reflect the previous year. This means rule year 2026 information will not be available until Spring 2027, so to address this the PRD will use information for rule year 2025 for rule year 2026 until new rules are released in 2027.
• PRD Clean-up
  • Removed code that saved duplicates of input data into the global environment. This was an artifact leftover from PRD debugging that can slow down performance if not removed.

Fixes:

• CCDF Estimates
  • Errors in Alaska calculations
    • CCDF values were not populating for Alaska because of an issue in the benefits calculator that failed to correctly merge ccdfData_AK to temp
  • Income Calculations
    • Flawed logic in temp$income calculation allowed for negative income after accounting for temp$IncomeDisregard causing benefits values not to populate for certain states. This was resolved by using the following code to force temp$income to 0 if it were to become negative after accounting for temp$IncomeDisregard:
    • temp$income<-rowMaxs(cbind((temp$income-12*temp$IncomeDisregard),0))
• SNAP estimates
  • Reconciled differences in reported Ohio BBCE eligibility thresholds.
    • The PRD recorded GrossIncomeEligibilityFPL as 130% of FPL for Ohio, in accordance with information reported by USDA, but the eligibility threshold, as reported by benefits.ohio.gov, is 200% of FPL. A partner in Ohio informed us that what is reported by benefits.ohio.gov is the correct amount not what is reported by USDA.