Not always. There’s usually some kind of reduced price or free program for low income households. Edit: this is a federally administrated program so the free/reduced costs for low income households should apply to all schools.

And I feel like it’s somewhat more common to have just free lunch for all compared to th past? (But most schools stay paid…) My school district switched to free meals for everyone my 2nd year of highschool. But that’s all location dependant.

Looks like California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont all have free school meals across the board, which accounts for a bit more than 20% of the country. But this is a SUPER recent development, California was the first and that was only in 2022.