Can You Get Medicaid If You Own a House in NY?

You can get Medicaid in New York if you own a house. Your primary residence is generally an exempt asset, so it doesn’t count against the resource limits that decide eligibility. Whether the exemption holds depends on which Medicaid program you’re applying for, how much equity you have in the home, and who lives there.

Which Medicaid Program You’re Applying For Matters First

New York runs two separate eligibility tracks, and only one of them looks at what you own.

MAGI Medicaid covers most adults under 65 who are not disabled. Eligibility is based entirely on modified adjusted gross income. There is no asset test at all. Your house, your car, your savings, your investments — none of it factors in.¹ If you’re a working-age adult applying for standard Medicaid health coverage, owning a home is simply not a question the application asks.

Non-MAGI Medicaid is the track that tests both income and resources. It covers people who are 65 or older, blind, or disabled, and it governs Institutional Medicaid for nursing home care.² If you fall into this category, the rules below apply to you.

When Your Home Is Exempt

For non-MAGI applicants, the primary residence is exempt as long as you intend to return home, even if you’re currently in a nursing facility. The home also qualifies for the exemption if any of these people live there:

Your spouse
Your child under 21
Your child who is blind or permanently disabled

Without a documented intent to return and without a qualifying relative in the home, it can become a countable resource.

The Equity Cap

The exemption has a ceiling. For 2026, home equity above $1,130,000 disqualifies you from nursing facility services unless a spouse or qualifying child lives in the home.² Equity means the fair market value of the home minus the mortgage balance, home equity loans, and any other liens.

If your equity is close to the limit, federal law specifically allows a reverse mortgage or home equity loan to bring it below the threshold.³ One caution: unspent loan proceeds sitting in your account at the end of the month become a countable resource, and with New York’s tight limits they can push you over quickly.

When a spouse lives in the home, the equity cap doesn’t apply at all. The residence is fully exempt regardless of value.³

The Other Numbers You Need to Meet

Even with an exempt home, you still have to satisfy the resource and income limits on everything else. For 2026, non-MAGI applicants face these thresholds:¹

Resource limit, single applicant: $33,038
Resource limit, couple: $44,796
Monthly income limit, single: $1,836
Monthly income limit, couple: $2,489

Alongside the house, several other assets don’t count. One vehicle used for transportation is exempt regardless of value.⁴ Personal belongings and household furnishings are exempt. Up to $1,500 in a designated burial fund is exempt, and burial plots and irrevocable prepaid funeral contracts are exempt regardless of amount.⁵

Retirement accounts are treated differently depending on whether they’re in payout status. An IRA or 401(k) paying regular periodic distributions is not counted as a resource; the distributions instead count as income. An account sitting untouched counts in full at its balance.⁶ Roth IRAs follow the same rule, but since they carry no required minimum distributions you have to actively elect payouts to get the exemption.

Countable resources include cash and bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, additional real estate like vacation homes or rentals, and the cash surrender value of life insurance policies whose combined face value exceeds $1,500. Term life with no cash value doesn’t count.

Spousal Protections If One Spouse Enters a Nursing Home

When one spouse needs nursing home care and the other stays at home, the standard couple resource limit is replaced by the Community Spouse Resource Allowance. For 2026, the community spouse can keep between $74,820 and $162,660 in countable resources, calculated as half of the couple’s combined countable assets at the time of institutionalization, within that floor and ceiling.¹

A couple with $300,000 in countable resources, for example, would see the community spouse keep $150,000, with the institutionalized spouse spending down the remaining $150,000 to $33,038 before Medicaid kicks in for the nursing home care.

Giving Away the House: The Look-Back Period

Medicaid reviews your financial history looking for gifts and below-market transfers. For nursing home Medicaid, New York examines every transaction in the 60 months before your application. Improper transfers trigger a penalty period during which Medicaid will not pay for your nursing home costs, calculated by dividing the value of the transfers by the regional average nursing home cost.

For Community Medicaid covering home care and other community-based long-term services, New York authorized a 30-month look-back years ago but has never actually put it into effect. Implementation has been postponed repeatedly, and as of early 2026 no transfer penalties are applied to Community Medicaid applicants.⁷ This could change, so anyone planning significant transfers should track updates from the Department of Health.

Transfers That Don’t Trigger a Penalty

Certain transfers of the home are exempt from the look-back even for Institutional Medicaid. You can transfer the home without penalty to:

Your spouse
A child under 21, or a child who is blind or permanently disabled
A caregiver child: an adult child who lived in the home for at least two years immediately before your nursing facility admission and provided care that helped you avoid or delay institutionalization, documented through medical records or caregiver logs
A sibling with equity interest: a sibling who owns a share of the property and lived there for at least one year immediately before your admission⁸

What Happens to the House After You Die

An exempt home during your lifetime is not the same as a protected home after your death. New York’s Medicaid Estate Recovery Program can pursue reimbursement from the estate of anyone who received Medicaid at age 55 or older, or who was permanently institutionalized at any age. The claim reaches the home along with other real and personal property.⁸

Recovery is deferred while certain family members are alive or living in the home:

A surviving spouse, for the spouse’s lifetime
A child under 21, or a blind or permanently disabled child, for as long as the child survives
A caregiver child who meets the two-year residence and care standard and has continuously lived in the home since
A sibling with an equity interest who lived in the home for at least one year before your admission and has continuously lived there since⁹

The state may waive recovery for undue hardship on the heirs, but the standard for proving hardship is high. For families whose main goal is passing the home to the next generation, planning around estate recovery often matters more than the eligibility question itself.

1
New York State Department of Health. GIS 26 MA/05 Attachment I – Income and Resource Standards
2
New York State Senate. New York Social Services Law SOS 366 – Medical Assistance for Needy Persons
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 1396p – Liens, Adjustments and Recoveries, and Transfers of Assets
4
New York State Department of Health. Medicaid Reference Guide – Automobiles and Other Vehicles
5
New York State Department of Health. Medicaid Reference Guide – Burial Funds
6
New York State Department of Health. Medicaid Eligibility and the Treatment of Income and Assets
7
New York State Department of Health. 30-Month Lookback for Community Based Long Term Care Services
8
New York State Senate. New York Social Services Law 369 – Application of Other Provisions
9
New York State Department of Health. Important Information Regarding Medicaid Estate Recovery