If your husband or wife needs Medicaid to pay for a nursing home or other long term care, you may be able to keep a certain amount of your savings. That amount is called the community spousal resource allowance, or CSRA.
When a married person applies for Medicaid, the Medicaid agency looks at both spouses’ assets, or resources, in determining eligibility. Normally, a Medicaid applicant must have less than $2,000 in resources to be eligible for the Medicaid long term care program.
However, if your spouse needs Medicaid and you don’t, you may be able to keep part of your savings as part of the CSRA. There’s a formula for calculating the CSRA – it’s basically half of the resources that you as a couple have on the date your spouse became institutionalized, what’s called the snapshot date. The snapshot date could be the date your spouse was first admitted to the hospital, or first entered a nursing home, or was found clinically eligible for long term care Medicaid, or certain other dates.
However, the CSRA is subject to a minimum and maximum. As of 2026, the minimum is around $30,000, and the maximum is around $160,000, but these figures are indexed to inflation and change every year.
One of the strategies we use for Medicaid planning or asset protection planning is to try to make sure our clients can keep the maximum CSRA, the largest amount possible of the couple’s savings. However, the rules around the CSRA are complicated, and there’s a lot of money at stake, so it makes sense to work with an elder law attorney on this. If you have questions about the CSRA or other aspects of Medicaid, nursing homes and long term care, please call or email FriedmanLaw.