An SSI recipient renting a converted garage apartment from her adult son pays him $380 a month. Whether that arrangement quietly shrinks her monthly check has depended, for 36 years, on a legal technicality most families renting to or from a relative never knew existed: which of the country’s federal appeals circuits they happened to live in. On August 31, 2026, the Social Security Administration closed that gap for good by formally retiring the 1990 ruling that, on its own, only ever bound three of them.
What The 1990 Ruling Actually Covered
The rule being retired is Acquiescence Ruling (AR) 90-2(2), published July 16, 1990, in response to a federal appeals court decision, Ruppert v. Bowen, 871 F.2d 1172 (2d Cir. 1989). The Second Circuit held that the agency could not simply presume an SSI recipient was getting a financial benefit from cheap rent just because the fair market rental value of a place was higher than what the tenant actually paid. Instead, the court said, the agency had to look for an actual economic benefit before counting anything as “in-kind support and maintenance,” or ISM — the SSA’s term for free or reduced-cost food and shelter that can reduce an SSI check.
To carry out that holding, AR 90-2(2) told field offices that if a tenant’s required monthly rent equaled or exceeded the Presumed Maximum Value described in 20 CFR 416.1140, the agency would treat the arrangement as a genuine business deal and would not count any rental subsidy at all. That sounds like a nationwide policy, but it was not. Acquiescence Rulings bind the agency only within the specific federal appeals circuit that issued the holding, under 20 CFR 416.1485. Ruppert came out of the Second Circuit, so AR 90-2(2) legally applied only to SSI claims decided in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. It was one of several nearly identical rulings born from separate appeals court decisions in other circuits — the agency’s own account of the history says that, put together, this patchwork of court-driven exceptions covered seven states total: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New York, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. If you rented a room from a relative anywhere else in the country before September 30, 2024, this exact protection was never guaranteed to you the same way.
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The 2024 Regulation That Already Made This Nationwide
The reason SSA can retire a 36-year-old ruling without taking anything away is that it already fixed the geographic gap two years ago. On April 11, 2024, the agency published a final rule, “Expansion of the Rental Subsidy Policy for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Applicants and Recipients,” which took effect September 30, 2024. That rule rewrote 20 CFR 416.1130(b)(1) to match both the Ruppert holding and the policy AR 90-2(2) had spelled out — but this time as a binding regulation covering every state, not just three. Once the regulation itself said what the AR used to say, the AR had nothing left to do. The Federal Register notice rescinding AR 90-2(2) is explicit about this: the rescission is a housekeeping cleanup of an obsolete cross-reference, not a benefit change. Nothing about how your rent is treated shifts because of the August 31 notice itself — the operative rule has been the regulation since late 2024.
The Rent Number That Decides If Your Check Shrinks
Under the current regulation, you are not counted as receiving a rental subsidy if the required monthly rent you pay equals or exceeds your Presumed Maximum Value, or PMV. The PMV is calculated as one-third of the federal SSI benefit rate plus $20. With the 2026 federal benefit rate at $994 a month for an individual, that puts the 2026 PMV at $351.33. So if you pay $351.33 a month or more in required rent — to anyone, family included — no in-kind support and maintenance gets counted against your check, no matter how far below true market value that rent actually is.
Fall short of that number and the agency does the math the other way: it counts, as ISM, the difference between your required rent and whichever is lower, the PMV or the unit’s actual current market rental value. Take the son-and-mother example above: paying $380 a month clears the $351.33 threshold outright, so nothing is counted. A tenant paying only $200 a month, with a $351.33 PMV lower than the apartment’s real market rent, would have $151.33 counted as unearned income each month, which lowers the SSI payment by roughly that amount after applicable exclusions. The dollar figure that actually matters to your check is the rent you’re charged versus that PMV line — not what the property would fetch from a stranger.
Renting From Family Still Draws Extra Scrutiny
The regulation’s “business arrangement” language exists because SSA has long treated family rental deals with more suspicion than a lease with a stranger, on the assumption that relatives might understate rent, forgive it quietly, or never really expect payment. To get the protection, the rent has to be a genuine, required obligation — not a token gesture that’s waived whenever money is tight. You do not need a formal written lease, but you should be able to show the arrangement is real: a consistent monthly amount, a record of payments, and no pattern of the landlord-relative letting it slide. If you live with the relative and they provide both your food and your shelter under one roof, a different rule applies — the one-third reduction, which is a flat cut regardless of market rent — rather than the rental-subsidy math above. The rental-subsidy standard in this notice is specifically for people paying rent for a separate space, like a basement apartment or a garage conversion, even when the landlord is their own child or parent. If that’s your household, keeping a simple paper trail of what’s actually charged and paid is what protects your check, not the address on your Social Security file.
The notice itself was signed out of the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland headquarters at 6401 Security Boulevard, closing out a docket, SSA-2025-0057, that existed only to formalize what the 2024 rule had already settled. For a family weighing what to charge a relative renting a room, the number worth writing down is the current Presumed Maximum Value published under 20 CFR 416.1140 — not the ruling that just got retired.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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