Illinois Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits, or SNAP benefits, are paid out each month on the Illinois EBT card — which is known as the Illinois Link Card. The link card operates like any other EBT card, and is preloaded once a month with the amount of each household’s individual benefit.

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The USDA extended allotments of food stamp benefits under an emergency declaration during the pandemic, which effectively increased each recipient’s EBT allowance to the maximum allowable each month based upon their household size. If you were already receiving the full amount, this unfortunately did not increase your benefit. Currently, the waiver is not set to extend into March for Illinois, which means your payment could revert back to what you were getting before the emergency allotments were authorized.

Link cards in Illinois will have payments deposited depending on the last numbers of their individually assigned case numbers.

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If you had a SNAP case that was converted from a legacy case into the link system, you will keep your legacy availability date of either the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 13th, 17th, or 20th.

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For newly approved cases on the link system, the benefit availability date is between the 1st and the 10th of the month. The Illinois DHH states that this is based on the month already set in IES and is selected based on the last digit of the head of household’s (HOH) individual identification number.

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