HOW TO PREPARE TO ACCEPT SNAP EBT CHIP CARDS
It’s never too early to prepare to accept SNAP EBT chip cards—even if your state doesn’t yet offer a means to do so—by training your cashiers and creating a fallback plan.
Here are steps you can take today:
Step 1: Ask your POS provider about their timeline.
Reach out to your POS provider to ask about their timeline for enabling SNAP EBT chip functionality. If their expected date is far in the future, you can still put a fallback plan in place for any EBT chip cards you may encounter in the meantime.
Step 2: Train your cashiers on how to handle EBT chip cards.
Training staff on how to handle new EBT chip cards is essential to ensure smooth transactions, minimize errors, and provide a seamless shopping experience for SNAP customers.
Review and share our retailer instructions for using EBT chip cards with your team so SNAP participants can successfully complete purchases using their SNAP benefits.
Step 3: Confirm your system can fall back to the magnetic stripe.
During the transition to SNAP EBT chip, all EBT chip cards will continue to include a magnetic stripe. Retailers who are not yet able to accept EBT chip transactions can still ensure successful purchases by confirming their terminals support magnetic stripe fallback.
This capability—called ECL (Empty Candidate List) fallback—allows the POS system to request a magnetic stripe swipe after one failed chip reading when chip processing is not yet supported.
Step 4: Test your system for ECL fallback.
To test your system for ECL fallback, use USDA’s ECL test scripts and test cards. These can be requested from your POS provider or your state’s EBT payment processor. See contacts below to make your request.
Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia
Send request to:
jamie.topolski@conduent.com
Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, DC, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Send request to: EMV.EBT@fisglobal.com
Louisiana
Montana
Send request to:
SolutionsCenter@nationalgrocers.org
Step 5: Get ready for rollout
Once your POS system has been fully updated to support EBT chip transactions—and testing has been completed—you will be ready to accept SNAP EBT chip cards as they are rolled out in your state.
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