Which Health Plans Pay for Food in 2026

Every page about free grocery deliveries ends at the same sentence: check with your health plan. That is where it stops, because the answer is not written in one place a person can read — it is filed plan by plan, county by county, in the benefit packages every Medicare Advantage plan submits to CMS.

Those filings are public. The checker below reads them for contract year 2026 — 1,947 plans across 3,143 counties — and tells you which plans sold where you live actually filed a food and produce benefit, and what stands between you and it. If your side of this is Medicaid instead, it will tell you the income limit your state uses.

The benefit has a name, and it is not the delivery company

The single most useful thing to know is that the box and the benefit are two different things. FarmboxRx, and the handful of companies like it, are vendors. What they deliver is paid for by a benefit the health plan filed — and plans switch vendors between years without the benefit changing at all.

So the question that gets an answer is never “is FarmboxRx available to me.” It is “does my plan pay for food, and who does it use to ship it.” Asked that way, the member services line can actually look it up. Asked the other way, they often say they have never heard of the company, and the call ends there.

In the CMS filings the benefit appears under three separate names, and they are not interchangeable:

• Food and produce. Groceries or a healthy-food card. This is the one the produce-box programs run on.
• Home-delivered meals. Prepared meals, usually a fixed number of them, not raw ingredients.
• Meals after a hospital stay. A short run of meals following an inpatient admission or surgery. Far more plans file this one than file groceries, and it is the most common reason someone is told “yes, we have a meal benefit” and then finds it lasts two weeks.

Why enrolling is not the same as qualifying

Food and produce is filed with CMS as a Special Supplemental Benefit for the Chronically Ill. That category exists precisely so that plans can offer something to some members and not others, which regular Medicare Advantage benefits are not allowed to do. The plan sets the clinical criteria and decides who meets them.

This is the answer to the most common complaint about these programs: someone joins a plan the internet said had a grocery benefit, and the card never arrives. The benefit was real and the plan did file it. They were simply not in the group the plan pays it for.

The checker splits the plans in your county by who can join in the first place, because that is a second gate underneath the first: dual-eligible plans require you to have Medicaid as well as Medicare, chronic-condition plans require a qualifying diagnosis, and institutional plans require a nursing-home level of care. In most counties the majority of plans filing a food benefit are dual-eligible plans — which makes Medicaid, not the plan, the thing actually standing in the way.

Medicaid is the gate more often than the plan is

Medicaid income limits are not national. Each state sets its own, as a percentage of the federal poverty level, and they differ by more than most people would guess: an adult with no children qualifies at up to 138% of poverty in most states and is not eligible at any income in ten of them. Parents are covered on a separate line that in some states sits below 15%.

That is why the second half of the checker asks for your state and household size rather than giving one number. And it is why “I applied years ago and was turned down” is worth revisiting — several states have opened the adult pathway since, and the dollar limits move every January with the poverty guidelines.

The calendar decides more than you would think

Medicaid has no season. You can apply on any day, and if you qualify, coverage generally starts right away and can sometimes be backdated.

Medicare Advantage is the opposite. For most people the plan can only be changed between October 15 and December 7, for coverage starting January 1. There is a second window from January 1 to March 31 for people already in a Medicare Advantage plan. And people who have both Medicare and Medicaid, or who receive Extra Help with drug costs, generally get a special enrollment period once per quarter — which is worth knowing, because those are exactly the people the food benefit is aimed at.

Common questions

Does the checker send my information anywhere? No. The CMS tables are loaded into your browser and the lookup happens there. Nothing you type is transmitted or stored.

My plan is not in the list. Did I do something wrong? Probably not. The list only contains plans that filed a food and produce benefit for this contract year. Standalone Part D drug plans, Medigap policies, employer retiree plans and Original Medicare are not there at all, because none of them can carry this kind of benefit.

The counts do not match what an agent told me. The figures come from the plan’s own filing with CMS for the 2026 contract year. If an agent is describing a different year, or an optional package you would pay extra for, the numbers will not line up. Ask which contract year they are reading from.

I have Medicaid but not Medicare. Does any of this reach me? Sometimes, through a Medicaid managed care plan rather than a Medicare one. Those benefits are set by state contract instead of by CMS filing, so they are not in this dataset — ask your Medicaid plan directly whether it has a food or produce benefit.

Will asking about this affect my immigration case? Medicaid for a household member and Medicare plan benefits are not counted the way people fear. The public charge rule the Department of Homeland Security has applied since 2022 does not weigh most health coverage. Rules change, so confirm on the official site or with an immigration lawyer before deciding.

This page is an independent guide. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, any state Medicaid agency, FarmboxRx or any health plan. Figures come from the CMS Plan Benefit Package files for contract year 2026, MACPAC’s published Medicaid eligibility levels and the 2026 HHS poverty guidelines, and are provided for orientation — your plan and your state agency make the final determination. Enrolling is always free.