Every public school student in New York eats breakfast and lunch free

If your child’s public, charter, or nonpublic school participates in the National School Lunch Program or School Breakfast Program, they can eat breakfast and lunch at school for free every day. Families don’t fill out an income form to get the meals. The law requires participating schools to serve both meals free to all students.

Before this, free meals depended on family income or on whether a school served enough low-income students to qualify for a federal program. Families just above the cutoff paid full price, and advocates say stigma kept some kids from eating and left parents with school meal debt. The state estimates free meals save families about $1,600 per child a year.

Sen. Michelle Hinchey and Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas carried the Universal School Meals Act for more than two years, with advocates pushing alongside them. Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha also championed the program. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who had left universal meals out of her 2023 budget, included the program in her 2025 budget proposal and signed it into law on May 9, 2025, with $340 million set aside for the first year. In the Senate, the budget bill that carried it passed 44–18, with four Republicans voting yes. Schools served 396 million free meals in the first school year, and the next year’s budget raised funding to $395 million.