US SNAP benefit issuance schedule intelligence (annual)

Annual US retail demand-timing panel from the keyless USDA Food and Nutrition Service 'Monthly Issuance Schedule for All States and Territories' document (transcribed and verified 2026-09-30): one row per jurisdiction (50 states + District of Columbia + Guam + Puerto Rico + U.S. Virgin Islands). Each row carries the sorted calendar days on which SNAP benefits land on recipients' EBT cards (as a compact comma list plus start/end/window/active metrics and an issuance_precision flag: 'exact' for 52 jurisdictions, 'envelope' for New York and Pennsylvania, whose day lists are documented calendar envelopes rather than exact schedules), the stagger classification (not_staggered / continuous / select_days / county_variable for Pennsylvania's county cycles), the issuance basis (case number, SSN, last name, birth date/month, ID or EDG number — or none when the whole jurisdiction is issued on a single day), a documented 0-1 early_month_share (share of issuance days in the first 10 days of the month — the demand-pulse concentration; null for the NY/PA envelope rows, where it cannot be computed statically), a human-readable rule summary, and notes on exceptions (e.g. New Jersey's Warren County, New York City's month-varying dates, Puerto Rico's holiday shifts). Method: jurisdiction names entity-resolved to USPS codes + 2-digit FIPS + ISO alpha-3 through a closed map; each jurisdiction's issuance days transcribed as an explicit sorted day list so every derived metric is auditable; irregular schedules encoded with explicit day lists and documented notes instead of being smoothed away. Caveats: re-verified annually — states amend issuance rules; NYC exact dates vary month to month (panel encodes the 1st-14th calendar envelope; issuance_days_active=13 for NYC's 13 issuance days); Pennsylvania varies by county (panel encodes the 1st-14th calendar envelope; issuance_days_active=10 business days); issuance day marks benefit availability, while redemption spreads over the following days — treat as a pulse-onset feature, not a sales-level forecast. U.S. federal public domain (commercial reuse allowed with attribution to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service).