Which assets count for Medicaid, and which do not?

The short answer

Medicaid decides eligibility for long-term care by counting resources, and the federal statute that governs transfers of assets says what the word “resources” means: it points to the Supplemental Security Income definition in title 42 of the U.S. Code. So the list of what counts is not invented by each state. Cash, money in bank accounts, stocks, mutual funds and savings bonds, digital currencies and money held in digital wallets, land, life insurance, vehicles, personal property, and anything else you own that could be changed into cash and used for food or shelter all fall on the countable side.

Just as important is that a second list exists. The home you live in and the land under it do not count. One vehicle does not count regardless of its value if anyone in the household uses it for transportation. Household goods and personal effects, including wedding and engagement rings, do not count, and neither do burial spaces or burial funds up to a stated amount. An asset that never reaches the countable side cannot push an applicant over the limit no matter how large it grows.

What counts

The federal list of resources is deliberately open-ended. Its last clause is the one that catches people: anything else you own that could be turned into cash and used for food or shelter. In practice a caseworker is looking for value that is reachable, so the countable column ends up looking like this.

• Cash, and money held in a bank, credit union or brokerage account.
• Stocks, mutual funds and U.S. savings bonds.
• Digital currencies and money held in digital wallets.
• Land, including a second home or a lot that nobody lives on.
• Life insurance, in the sense of a policy's value to the owner.
• Vehicles beyond the one the household uses for transportation.
• Retirement money that is reachable — this is where the answer gets state-specific, and it is the reason two households with the same savings describe different outcomes.

Nothing on that list is a surprise to most families. What surprises them is the tail of it: the second car, the timeshare, the life insurance policy nobody thought of as savings. An application asks for the whole picture, and leaving something off the form does not make it uncountable.

What does not count

The exclusions are where the practical planning happens, because they are the assets a family can keep without the amount being held against them at the application.

• The home you live in, and the land it is on.
• Household goods and personal effects, with wedding and engagement rings named in the federal list.
• Life insurance policies when the combined face value of the policies is $1,500 or less.
• One vehicle, at any value, if you or a member of your household uses it for transportation.
• Burial spaces for you or your immediate family.
• Burial funds for you and your spouse, each valued at $1,500 or less.
• Property used in a trade or business, or property you need for your job when you work for someone else.
• Money and property set aside under a Plan to Achieve Self-Support, for someone who is blind or has a qualifying disability.
• Up to $100,000 in an ABLE account established through a state ABLE program.

A second group of exclusions is time-limited rather than permanent, and it matters when an application lands in the same year as a payment. Retroactive Social Security or SSI benefits are excluded for a set number of months after receipt, grants and gifts set aside for educational expenses are excluded for a period, and federal tax refunds and advanced tax credits are excluded for twelve months. Read the exclusion as a clock, not as a permanent shelter.

Your home: exempt from counting, not from recovery

The home is the asset families ask about first, and the answer has two halves that are often collapsed into one. At the application, the home and its land are excluded, which is why an applicant with a $400,000 house can still qualify. There is a ceiling on that exclusion, and it is written as home equity. The 2026 figures published by CMS set a minimum of $752,000 and a maximum of $1,130,000, with each state choosing a number inside that range. Equity above the state's ceiling is counted.

The second half is what happens later. Not counting an asset and never recovering it are separate rules. Medicaid.gov explains that states are required to recover payments from the estate of an enrollee age 55 or older for nursing facility services, home and community-based services, and related hospital and prescription drug services; recovery may also reach trusts in certain conditions. Two protections are written into the same page: no recovery while a surviving spouse or a child under 21, or a blind or disabled child of any age, is alive, and states must have a procedure to waive recovery when it would cause undue hardship. So the house is protected during the application and, in the ordinary case of a surviving spouse living in it, protected afterward too. A single applicant with no spouse and no dependent child should treat the house as part of the estate conversation rather than as something the rules never touch.

If you are married

Married applicants are assessed on the couple's combined resources, and then a protected share is set aside for the spouse who stays at home. CMS published the 2026 community spouse resource standard with a minimum of $32,532 and a maximum of $162,660, and the state selects the figure within that range. Only the resources above the protected share are counted against the applicant.

Income is handled separately and later, after eligibility is established rather than at the point of it. The same CMS bulletin sets the community spouse's minimum monthly maintenance needs allowance at $2,705 for all states except Alaska and Hawaii, where it is $3,381.25 and $3,111.25, with a maximum of $4,066.50, and a monthly housing allowance of $811.50 outside those two states. Medicaid.gov also describes the post-eligibility calculation: an institutionalized person's own income has a personal needs allowance of at least $30 taken off the top before the remainder is contributed toward the cost of care. Those amounts change every year, which is why they should be read from the current bulletin rather than from a printed guide.

What to gather before you apply

The countable side of the line is decided on paperwork, and a caseworker can only compare what has been shown. Assembling this set in advance is not a trick; it is the difference between an application that moves and one that sits in a queue waiting for a statement.

1. Every account, with a balance on the application date. Bank, brokerage, retirement, crypto exchange: the balance on the date that matters is what gets counted.
2. Deeds and titles. The home, any land, any vehicles. The one-car exclusion is applied from the title, not from memory.
3. Life insurance statements showing face value. Face value, not cash value, is what the exclusion is written against.
4. Burial contracts and prepaid funeral arrangements. These are excluded up to a stated amount, and they are excluded only if they are documented.
5. Records of anything sold or given away. This is the part the look-back review asks about, and the records are easiest to collect while the accounts are still open.
6. The care bill itself. Knowing what the care costs makes the rest of the conversation concrete. The survey this site uses puts the 2025 national median for a semi-private nursing home room at $9,581 a month and a private room at $10,798, and the care cost calculator will put a monthly figure on one household. The nursing home cost page has the full breakdown.

Where these rules come from

The definition hook is federal statute: the Medicaid transfer-of-assets provisions in title 42 of the U.S. Code define “resources” by reference to the Supplemental Security Income definition, which is why the countable and excluded lists on this page read the way they do. The two lists, the $2,000 and $3,000 limits, the $1,500 life insurance and burial exclusions, the one-car exclusion and the $100,000 ABLE exclusion were read from Social Security's SSI resources page, 2026 edition. The $752,000 and $1,130,000 home equity limits and the $32,532 and $162,660 community spouse resource standard come from the CMS informational bulletin dated April 27, 2026, “Updated 2026 SSI and Spousal Impoverishment Standards,” published on Medicaid.gov. The estate recovery rules, including the age-55 trigger, the services recovered, the spousal and dependent-child protections and the undue hardship requirement, come from the Medicaid.gov estate recovery page. The personal needs allowance and the institutional eligibility difference come from the Medicaid.gov spousal impoverishment and nursing facilities pages. Medicaid.gov blocks direct connections from this server, so its pages were read through a text extraction service on the day of publication; Social Security and the Government Publishing Office responded directly. Nothing on this page is legal advice or tax advice, and no figure here replaces the number your state agency applies to your case.