The number of Amazon workers on food stamps nearly tripled between 2020 and the most recent count, a Government Accountability Office report found, even as the company’s annual profits soared from $11.6 billion to $77.7 billion over the same period.
The GAO sampled 11 states and found 12,346 Amazon employees enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP) and 11,338 relying on Medicaid.
Amazon’s 2025 revenue reached a record $717 billion, up 12% year-on-year from $638 billion.
Amazon disputes the Amazon workers food stamps findings
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty told Fortune the GAO’s conclusion was ‘wrong’, arguing it was misleading to use raw numbers rather than percentages.
‘Amazon pay is among the best in the industry,’ Lighty said in a statement. ‘Regular full-time employees have access to health care from their first day, at only $5 per week with $5 copays for employee-only coverage, and 74% of our regular full-time employees are enrolled in an Amazon health insurance plan, well above the 65% private-sector take-up rate for full-time workers.’
Walmart and FedEx recorded similar increases in workers claiming federal assistance, as did rideshare and delivery companies.
The wider picture: shrinking labour share
The GAO data arrives as Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show working Americans now take home just 52.8% of economic output, the lowest share since the bureau began tracking the metric in 1947.
Over the same period, the S&P 500 has gained 600% since the start of the century, while inflation-adjusted wages have risen just 12.5%.
Kathryn Larin, GAO director for education, workforce, and income security issues, said the data showed that people using social safety-net programmes today were overwhelmingly in work, most of them full time.
‘These are families that are really barely able to make ends meet, and yet they are working, and they are working a lot,’ Larin told Fortune.
The income threshold for SNAP eligibility is about 130% of the poverty line.
KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk has warned of the hidden consequences of a shrinking labour share, noting that since 1982 corporate profits as a share of US GDP rose from 8% to 15.85%, while employee compensation fell from 66.6% to 61.9%.
‘Inequality fuels social and economic instability,’ Swonk said.
Anna Stansbury, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said the trend had been building for around 50 years. She pointed to the decline in union membership, from 20.1% of US workers in 1983 to 10.0% in 2025, and to the growing use of subcontractors and gig workers in place of direct employees.
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok and economist Sania Edlich found in a white paper that among 321 occupations studied between 2015 and 2025, jobs with high exposure to AI saw a 6.7% decline in real wage growth after 2023, despite no employment changes, suggesting AI is compressing wages without cutting jobs.
Stansbury said a tightening labour market should, in theory, push labour share back up. If wage growth remains low even as inflation eases and employment stays tight, she said, ‘it would suggest that there’s actually been a secular shift, a secular acceleration in the downward trend.’
