When one spouse moves into a nursing home and applies for Medicaid to help pay for it, federal rules do not require the couple to spend down every dollar they have saved together first. The spouse who stays behind, known in Medicaid rules as the community spouse, is allowed to keep a protected pool of countable savings called the Community Spouse Resource Allowance. For 2026, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services set that maximum at $162,660, a figure the agency confirmed in bulletins issued in December 2025 and again in April 2026.
How the $162,660 Allowance Actually Works
The allowance is not a flat grant of $162,660 to every community spouse. Under the standard formula, the couple’s countable resources, generally excluding the home and one vehicle, are added together and split, with the community spouse typically entitled to keep the greater of a set minimum or half of that combined total, up to the federal maximum. CMS sets the 2026 minimum resource standard at $32,532 and the maximum at $162,660, both effective January 1, 2026. A couple with modest combined savings might see the community spouse keep the full amount they had; a couple with substantial combined assets sees the protection cap out at $162,660, with the rest counted toward the applying spouse’s eligibility limit.
Those figures are confirmed in the December 9, 2025 CMS bulletin, the same annual notice in which CMS also sets the year’s spousal impoverishment income allowances.
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Why This Protection Exists
The resource allowance traces to section 1924 of the Social Security Act, often called the spousal impoverishment rules, which Congress designed to stop a healthy spouse from being forced into poverty just so their partner could qualify for Medicaid-paid nursing care. Before those rules existed, some states required couples to exhaust nearly all shared assets, leaving the spouse still living independently with almost nothing to cover housing, food, and their own future care. The resource allowance is paired with a separate income protection, the Minimum Monthly Maintenance Needs Allowance, which CMS’s bulletins set at a maximum of $4,066.50 a month for 2026 — a related but distinct protection covering ongoing income rather than a lump sum of savings.
The Number Moves Every January, and CMS Just Confirmed It Again
Because Medicaid’s resource standards adjust annually, a figure quoted from an old bulletin can be wrong within months. CMS reissued its spousal impoverishment standards in an April 27, 2026 update, and the community spouse resource figures were carried forward unchanged at $32,532 and $162,660 while a separate, July-adjusted income allowance line was the only figure revised. That reissue is useful confirmation that the 2026 resource allowance set back in December is still the operative number deep into the year, not a first-quarter figure that has since moved.
What Counts Toward the $162,660, and What Doesn’t
Not everything a couple owns gets weighed against the resource allowance. Countable resources generally include bank accounts, certificates of deposit, non-retirement investment accounts, and additional real estate beyond the primary home, all of which get combined before the split described above is applied. Certain assets are typically set aside from that calculation entirely, including one vehicle, personal belongings and household goods, and prepaid burial arrangements, though the precise treatment of retirement accounts and life insurance cash value can vary by state. Because the mix of what counts differs from what a couple might assume just from looking at their bank balance, a household with retirement accounts or a second property should not assume they know their real countable total without a caseworker’s calculation.
This Protection Is Separate From the Home Equity Test
The resource allowance covers countable savings, investments, and similar assets; it has nothing to do with the couple’s house. A home the community spouse continues to live in is generally excluded from Medicaid’s asset test entirely, regardless of its value, as long as that spouse remains there. A different figure, the home equity limit, only comes into play when there is no community spouse or dependent living in the home, and it applies to home equity specifically rather than to bank accounts, retirement funds, or other savings covered by the resource allowance described here.
What Couples Facing This Decision Should Do
Because the exact dollar amount a community spouse can keep depends on the couple’s specific combined resources, the practical step is requesting an official resource assessment from the state Medicaid agency before applying, rather than assuming either the minimum or the maximum figure applies automatically. That process, sometimes called a spousal resource assessment, produces a documented calculation of countable assets as of the date the institutionalized spouse entered care, which then anchors the resource allowance calculation later in the actual Medicaid application. Getting that assessment done early, and keeping the paperwork, tends to prevent disputes over which assets count when the full application is eventually filed. CMS publishes the current standards on its own spousal impoverishment page, which is a reasonable starting point before that conversation with a state caseworker. Couples who wait until the nursing home admission is already underway to ask these questions often find themselves reconstructing account histories under time pressure, which is exactly the situation the resource assessment process is meant to avoid.
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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