Vermont Medicaid Transfer Penalty: Counted in Days, and the Rule Prints No Rate

Updated August 27, 2026. Quick answer: Vermont’s rule states the arithmetic and prints no number. Under the Health Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment rule, the number of DAYS in a penalty period equals the transfers disallowed in a given calendar month divided by the average daily cost to a privately-paying patient of nursing facility services in the state. That daily figure is published somewhere by Vermont; it is not in the rule, and this page does not guess at it.

What Vermont publishes

How the penalty period is calculated

• The rule is section 25.04 of Part 4 of the Health Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment rule, Special Rules for Medicaid Coverage of Long-Term Care Services and Supports. It states: the number of days in a penalty period are equal to the total value of all disallowed transfers made during a given calendar month divided by the average daily cost to a privately-paying patient of nursing facility services in the state.
• Because the divisor is daily, the answer is a number of days. Nothing in the section converts it to whole months, and there is no fraction to round away.
• The figure is fixed as of the date of application – or the date of discovery, if further disallowed transfers turn up after eligibility has already been determined.
• Each calendar month of transfers produces its own penalty period, and those periods run consecutively rather than concurrently, in the order the transfers occurred. If a later transfer is discovered while a penalty is still running, the day after the first period ends becomes the start date of the next.
• The penalty date is the first day on which the person would have been otherwise eligible – clinical criteria, citizenship, category, residency, living arrangement, resources and income in that order – and for someone with excess income the start date is the date the spend-down is met.
• Once running, a penalty period runs continuously from its first date even if the person stops receiving long-term care services and supports.
• When both spouses seek coverage the days are split, not doubled: for spouses found otherwise eligible at the same time the value of the disallowed transfer is divided by two, and if one spouse’s penalty is already running when the other applies the remaining days are divided by two.
• If the penalised spouse dies during the penalty, the days remaining in their penalty period are not reassigned to the surviving spouse.
• The look-back is measured from eligibility, not from the application alone: no penalty is imposed where the date of the transfer was more than 60 calendar months before the first month in which the individual both requests coverage of long-term care and meets all other requirements for eligibility.
• AHS does not establish a penalty period at all where restricted coverage would be an undue hardship, which the rule defines as depriving the individual of medical care such that their health or life would be endangered, or of food, clothing, shelter or other necessities of life.

Once you have the figure above, the Medicaid penalty period calculator does the arithmetic. This page is the Vermont rate record; the calculator is the class parent.

What this page does not settle

• This page has no dollar figure because Vermont’s rule has none. Section 25.04 names the divisor – the average daily cost to a privately-paying patient of nursing facility services in the state – and prints no amount anywhere in the rule. The whole of Part 4 was searched, not just that section: it contains exactly one dollar figure in 69,802 characters, and that one is a $2,500 income test for a dependent relative.
• Commercial eligibility sites do publish a Vermont divisor, and this page deliberately does not repeat it. A number that cannot be traced to a Vermont document is not a Vermont number, and quoting one here would make this page look more certain than the rule it is reporting.
• The rule is current, which is why the omission is informative rather than a stale copy: Part 4’s patient-share section carries a 01/01/2026 stamp (GCR 25-053) and the transfer section carries 01/01/2024 (GCR 23-085), while section 25.04 itself has not been amended since 01/15/2017 (GCR 16-097).
• Because the divisor is fixed at the date of application or discovery rather than at the date of the transfer, the figure that governs a Vermont file is whichever daily rate the Agency was using on that date – so even the correct published figure is only correct for a particular application.
• The order in which the eligibility criteria are tested matters to the start date, and for anyone with excess income the penalty does not start until the spend-down is met – so two people with identical transfers can have penalties that begin months apart.

Eligibility is decided by the state agency on the whole file, not by this one number. Nothing here is legal advice, and no one should transfer, retitle or give away property on the strength of a worksheet.

Sources

• Vermont Agency of Human Services, Health Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Rule, Part 4 – Special Rules for Medicaid Coverage of Long-Term Care Services and Supports (sections 25.03 to 25.05)
• Vermont Agency of Human Services, Health Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Rules (the rule index)

Each source above was retrieved and read against the state text on August 27, 2026. Every figure on this page was checked against those bytes.