Ohio’s SNAP application portal logged over 890,000 active cases as of early 2026, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services — a number that has held stubbornly high even as the state’s unemployment rate sits below four percent. The people behind those cases are not who most assume. Some of them have union cards. Some of them own their tools. Some of them, like Benny Fulton, have spent the better part of their adult lives crawling under houses to fix what’s broken for other people.
I found Benny through a call-for-sources I posted on social media in late January 2026, looking for working adults in Ohio who had recently navigated a government benefits application. His reply came within an hour. “I’m not embarrassed about it anymore,” he wrote. “Took me a while to get there, but I’ll talk.”
We met at a diner off Morse Road in Columbus on a Thursday morning. Benny, 52, arrived in a work jacket that still had pipe compound on the sleeve. He ordered coffee, black, and folded his hands on the table like a man who had been rehearsing what he wanted to say.
A Career That Should Have Been Enough
Benny Fulton has held a licensed plumbing certificate in Ohio since 1999. For most of the 2000s and early 2010s, the work was steady — residential jobs, some commercial contracts, a few years where he brought home close to $58,000 annually. He described those years with a quiet pride, the kind that comes from building something with your hands over decades.
But the picture grew more complicated through his mid-forties. A short-lived business partnership in 2017 ended badly, leaving him with roughly $14,000 in shared debt that went to collections. His credit score, he told me, dropped into the low 500s. He never fully rebuilt it. “I just stopped looking at the numbers,” Benny said. “If I didn’t look, it wasn’t real. That’s not smart, I know that now.”
By the fall of 2024, Benny was earning around $3,100 a month on average — enough to cover rent, utilities, and groceries for himself and his fiancée, Dara, who was completing a nursing degree at Columbus State. But plumbing work is seasonal, and the winter of 2024 into 2025 hit harder than most. By December, his monthly income had dropped to approximately $1,650 as jobs dried up and one of his regular contractors paused operations.
Dara was not working while finishing her degree. Their combined gross monthly income for that period put them below Ohio’s SNAP gross income threshold of 130 percent of the federal poverty level — which for a two-person household in fiscal year 2025 sat at approximately $1,945 per month. On paper, they qualified. Getting there was another matter.
The Application: Where the Anxiety Set In
Benny submitted his SNAP application through Ohio’s Ohio Benefits online portal in the first week of January 2025. He described the process as disorienting — not because the forms were impossible, but because the language assumed a familiarity with government systems he simply didn’t have.
He gathered two months of bank statements, his most recent paystubs from October and November 2024, a copy of his lease agreement, and documentation of Dara’s enrollment status at Columbus State. The upload process through the portal took him nearly two hours across two separate sessions — he lost his first draft when the system timed out.
Ohio law requires county departments to process SNAP applications and conduct interviews within 30 days for standard applicants. Benny waited 24 days before receiving a phone interview notice. The interview itself lasted about 12 minutes. He was approved on February 3, 2025 — roughly four weeks after he first applied.
What the Benefit Actually Covered — and What It Didn’t
Benny and Dara were approved for $387 per month in SNAP benefits. For a two-person household in their income bracket, that fell below Ohio’s maximum allotment of $535 per month for FY2025, which is calculated using net income after deductions. Benny’s net income, after the standard deduction and an earned income deduction applied to his self-employment status, reduced the benefit somewhat from the maximum.
The $387 covered roughly 60 percent of their monthly grocery spending, Benny estimated. What it did not cover was the compounding stress of everything else — a $780 monthly rent payment, a $214 utility bill from that cold December, and minimum payments on two credit cards carrying balances from the 2017 business collapse. “The food part, that actually helped,” he told me. “It meant I wasn’t putting eggs on the credit card. But it didn’t make the rest of the pile smaller.”
He was candid about the psychological weight. Benny described himself as someone who had always associated benefits programs with failure — a belief he traced to his father, a steelworker who considered asking for help a personal defeat. Sitting across from me, he shook his head at that. “My dad worked himself into the ground and died with nothing saved either. So I’m not sure what lesson I was supposed to take from that.”
The Recertification Problem — and a Mixed Outcome
By April 2025, Benny’s workload had rebounded. Spring and early summer are the busiest months in residential plumbing, and his average monthly income climbed back to approximately $2,900 by May. He reported the change to Franklin County as required, and his SNAP case was reviewed. His benefits were reduced to $94 per month in June before being closed entirely in August 2025 when his earnings exceeded the eligibility threshold.
He described this with something between relief and regret. Relief because higher income meant more stability. Regret because the period between the income increase and the case closure came with paperwork he felt unprepared for — two letters requesting updated income verification, a recertification form he nearly missed because it was addressed to an old email.
He did not owe anything back. The transition out of the program was, in the end, clean. But Benny was clear that this outcome depended on him catching the email in time, on a caseworker who answered the phone, and on a recertification window that happened to fall during a week when he wasn’t on a job site from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. “It worked out,” he said. “But a lot of that was luck.”
Where Things Stand Now — and What Benny Is Still Carrying
When I met Benny in January 2026, he had been off SNAP for five months. Work was steady again, and Dara was in the final semester of her nursing program. They were making plans — cautious ones. But the financial floor beneath them remains thin. His credit score, as of our conversation, sat at 531. He has no retirement savings at 52. The 2017 debt that started the slide had been settled, but the credit damage lingered.
He told me he had looked into whether his income might qualify him for any other assistance programs — Ohio’s Medicaid expansion, a utility assistance program through the state — but had not yet taken steps to apply. “I keep meaning to look into it and then a job comes in and I tell myself I’ll do it later,” he said. “That’s always been my problem. Later.”
Before we left the diner, I asked Benny what he wished he had known before applying. He thought about it for a moment, then said he wished someone had told him that the program was actually designed for situations like his — temporary, working, seasonal. “I spent two weeks talking myself into applying,” he said. “Two weeks of groceries I could have had.”
According to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, approximately 42 million Americans received SNAP benefits in a recent reporting period, and a significant share of those households include at least one working adult. Benny Fulton is one data point in that number — a man with calloused hands and a plumbing license who spent six months receiving modest food assistance during a hard winter and came out the other side with his dignity intact and a story he was finally willing to tell.
That willingness, I think, matters more than the dollar amounts. The shame that keeps working people from accessing programs they’ve paid into is its own kind of cost. Benny paid that cost for two weeks in December 2024. He doesn’t think it was worth it.
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