Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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Getting no 1099-K does not make the income tax-free, and the IRS still expects it reported.
Not getting a tax form in the mail does not erase the tax bill it would have documented. That is the single biggest misunderstanding hanging over Form 1099-K this filing season, especially now that the federal reporting bar sits at $20,000 and 200 transactions instead of the lower figure Congress once planned. A gig driver,…
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Some states still send a 1099-K at $600, whatever the federal $20,000 threshold says.
A part-time seller in Worcester, Massachusetts, who moved roughly $2,200 in used furniture and freelance design work through payment apps this year will still get a Form 1099-K in January. That comes as a surprise to a lot of people, because Congress just pushed the federal reporting bar for those forms back up to $20,000.…
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The new rent ceilings rest on census rents collected between 2020 and 2024, then pushed forward.
The rent ceiling HUD is imposing nationwide this fall was not measured this year, or even last year. It traces back to a five-year Census Bureau survey that began collecting rent data in 2020, years before the sharpest run-up in the rental market. The Fair Market Rents that take effect October 1, 2026, for fiscal…
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No local rent ceiling may fall below the state or national non-metro median rent.
Some of the cheapest rental markets in the country just picked up a rule that has nothing to do with how cheap rent actually is there. Each October, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recalculates the ceiling that decides how much a Housing Choice Voucher will cover in every county and metro area in…
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HUD changed how it prices utilities inside the rent ceiling because the government stopped publishing the local index.
For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked what households paid for electricity and natural gas city by city, feeding that local detail into how the government calculates rent ceilings for housing vouchers nationwide. Then the agency stopped. Starting with data published in February 2025, BLS discontinued the local and regional versions of that index,…
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Housing agencies get three months after October 1 to move payment standards to the new rent ceilings.
Federal regulations do not require a housing authority to change anything the moment a new rent ceiling takes effect. HUD’s fiscal year 2027 Fair Market Rents become official on October 1, 2026, but the agencies that actually run local voucher programs have a separate, longer clock for putting those numbers to work. Under HUD’s own…
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Most parents cannot tell which Medicaid pathway covers them, and only the expansion group faces the work rule.
Not every parent on Medicaid answers to the same set of rules, and the new work requirement is exposing how many people don’t know which set applies to them. One group of parents has been shielded from Medicaid work rules for decades under a mandatory coverage category that predates the Affordable Care Act. Another group,…
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A state may hand the Medicaid work-rule notice to its managed care plan to mail.
Some states writing their Medicaid work-requirement outreach plans this year made a choice that surprised a few advocates: instead of mailing every notice from a state office, they handed part of the job to the private health insurance companies that already run their Medicaid managed care plans. Under the federal rule, that is explicitly allowed,…
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CMS wrote the Medicaid work rule June 1, and it took effect July 31.
June 1 to July 31 is a two-month gap that matters if you are one of the roughly 20 million Medicaid enrollees who could be affected by the program’s new work requirement. That is the span between the day the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services signed the rule creating the requirement and the day…
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A Medicaid work-rule notice has to arrive two ways, by mail and by phone, text or online account.
Across the country, Medicaid caseworkers are assembling mailing lists this month for a notice that will decide whether millions of enrollees keep their coverage past the end of the year. The letter itself is only half the job. Under the federal rule that created Medicaid’s new work requirement, a state cannot rely on a single…
