Earning a full-time salary does not automatically disqualify you from federal food assistance — and for millions of working parents in high-cost cities, that gap between gross income and actual survival money is the whole story. It certainly was for Samantha Reeves.
I met Samantha at a coffee shop near her apartment in the Sloan’s Lake neighborhood of Denver on a Thursday morning before her afternoon shift. She had maybe ninety minutes. Her seven-year-old daughter, Maya, was at school. Her scrubs were already on.
A Salary That Looks Fine on Paper
Samantha Reeves, 31, has worked as a registered nurse at a community hospital in Denver for four years. She earns approximately $68,000 annually — a number that sounds stable until you map it against Denver’s cost of living in 2026. After federal and state taxes, her take-home pay runs roughly $4,300 a month.
Rent on her two-bedroom apartment costs $1,650 a month. Daycare for Maya when she was younger ran $1,400 a month — a figure Samantha said she repeated to me twice, as if she still couldn’t fully accept it. Her student loan payment on $38,000 in nursing school debt is $390 a month. Groceries, utilities, and a used Honda that needs new brake pads account for most of what’s left.
Her ex-partner — Maya’s father — stopped contributing financially two years ago. “He just kind of evaporated,” Samantha told me, in a tone that was more exhausted than angry. “I filed for child support. That process is still going. In the meantime, I pick up overtime when I can, which means sometimes Maya is at after-care until six-thirty and I feel like garbage about it.”
She was picking up an average of six extra hours of overtime per week in early 2025, pushing her gross closer to $72,000 that year. She still couldn’t save more than $200 in a given month.
Why She Almost Never Applied
Samantha had never seriously considered SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — because she assumed a nurse’s salary put her well out of range. That assumption, she told me, cost her nearly a year of benefits she was entitled to.
“My coworker Deja mentioned she was on SNAP and I actually laughed,” Samantha said. “I thought she was joking. Then she showed me her approval letter and I just sat there with my mouth open.”
What Samantha didn’t know — and what most working adults in similar situations don’t know — is that SNAP eligibility is calculated on net income after a series of deductions, not gross wages. Those deductions can include a 20 percent earned income deduction, a standard household deduction, and — critically — the actual cost of dependent care paid in order to work or attend school.
Samantha’s $1,400 monthly daycare bill, combined with her earned income deduction and standard deduction, pulled her calculated net income significantly below what her paycheck suggested. According to USDA guidelines, a household of two in 2025 had a net monthly income limit of approximately $1,580 to qualify for SNAP.
The Application and What She Found
Samantha applied through Colorado’s PEAK online portal in February 2025, about two weeks after her conversation with Deja. She said the process took roughly forty-five minutes — longer than she expected, mostly because she had to gather pay stubs, her lease, and documentation of Maya’s daycare costs.
Her approved monthly benefit was $127. She laughed a little when she told me, not dismissively — more like someone who had recalibrated her expectations. “It’s not nothing,” she said. “That’s groceries for a week. That’s Maya’s fruit and yogurt and the good cereal she likes. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t matter.”
She also mentioned that the caseworker flagged her overtime income as a variable, which means her benefit amount gets reviewed every six months and could decrease if her overtime picks up significantly. That uncertainty bothered her more than the amount itself.
The Tax Credit She Had Been Missing
During our conversation, Samantha mentioned almost offhandedly that a tax preparer had helped her claim the Child and Dependent Care Credit on her 2024 federal return — something she had not done in the two prior years, again because she assumed she wouldn’t qualify.
According to the IRS, the Child and Dependent Care Credit allows taxpayers to claim a percentage of qualifying dependent care expenses — up to $3,000 for one child — paid to enable them to work. For taxpayers in Samantha’s adjusted gross income range, the credit rate is 20 percent, meaning she received a non-refundable credit of roughly $600 on her 2024 return.
She’s not alone in that gap. The Child and Dependent Care Credit is one of the more commonly missed credits among single-parent filers, partly because the rules around qualifying expenses and provider identification numbers can feel complicated without professional guidance.
Where Things Stand Now
When I spoke with Samantha in late March 2026, her SNAP benefit had dropped to $94 a month after a routine review caught a stretch of heavier overtime in the fall of 2025. She was philosophical about it. Maya is now in second grade, which eliminated the $1,400 daycare expense — her school is public and the after-care program runs $280 a month, a fraction of what she was paying before.
That drop in dependent care costs meant her SNAP benefit would likely disappear entirely at her next review. She knew it. “I’m not sad about it,” she said. “It means I’m doing a little better. I’ll take that.”
Her student loans remain at just under $35,000 — she’s paid down roughly $3,500 over four years, mostly through minimum payments. She told me she thinks about Public Service Loan Forgiveness sometimes, given that she works at a nonprofit community hospital, but hasn’t yet confirmed whether her employer qualifies or submitted the paperwork to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan.
“I keep meaning to deal with it,” she said, gathering her jacket. “That’s kind of my answer for a lot of things right now. I keep meaning to.”
There was nothing self-pitying in how she said it. It was a fact, stated plainly by a woman who works twelve-hour shifts on her feet and comes home to make dinner for a seven-year-old and then goes to sleep and does it again. The plans are real. The energy to execute them runs out somewhere around 8 p.m.
What I kept thinking about after we parted ways was the year she spent not applying for SNAP because she was certain she’d be turned away. That assumption — shared by a lot of working people in high-cost cities — cost her roughly $1,500 in benefits she had every right to. The rules exist. Knowing they exist is the entire obstacle.
Samantha’s situation is not resolved. It is better, incrementally. And she is still, by every measure, holding it together on her own.
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