Updated August 27, 2026. Quick answer: Arkansas calls the instrument an “Irrevocable Income Trust (also known as a Miller Income Trust or MIT.)” The state’s fact sheet is unusually practical about the bank account, because that is where these fail: “This account must only be used for your income trust.” The reassurance most people want is also stated outright — “money in an income trust account is never considered a resource”.
What Arkansas requires
| What the state sets out | What it says |
|---|---|
| Arkansas’s name for it | Irrevocable Income Trust (also known as a Miller Income Trust or MIT.) |
| The account | “This account must only be used for your income trust.” |
| How the balance is treated | “money in an income trust account is never considered a resource” |
| How the account should be titled | e.g. “The John Doe Irrevocable Income Trust/Jane Smith Trustee” |
| Where the policy lives | Income Trust Policy is found at MS H-110 through MS H-116 |
How it works in practice
- The single-purpose account rule is the operative one: “This account must only be used for your income trust.” Running trust income through a personal account, even briefly, is the most common way a compliant trust document produces a non-compliant trust.
- The balance question worries people who have spent years under an asset limit. Arkansas answers it directly: “money in an income trust account is never considered a resource”. Money sitting in the trust account at month end is not counted as a resource against you.
- Titling is not cosmetic. The fact sheet gives the pattern — “The John Doe Irrevocable Income Trust/Jane Smith Trustee” — naming the trust and the trustee, so the account is visibly the trust’s rather than the beneficiary’s.
The mechanism itself — why an income cap exists and what the trust must contain — is explained on the income-cap and Miller trust page. This page is the Arkansas record.
What this page does not settle
- The fact sheet is a summary. The binding policy is at Income Trust Policy is found at MS H-110 through MS H-116, and that is what an eligibility worker applies to your file.
- This page reads one source: Arkansas DHS, PUB-396 Income Trust Fact Sheet. It is the state’s own publication on this rule, but no state puts its whole treatment of excess income in a single document, and a detail that decides your case may sit in one this page did not read.
- A trust fixes an income problem and nothing else. The asset test, the level-of-care test and the transfer-of-assets look-back are separate hurdles, each decided on your own file, and meeting this rule does not clear any of them.
- Every quotation here was read against the source on August 27, 2026. States revise these rules, and a figure or a section number can move without the page around it changing. Open the source before you rely on a detail.
Eligibility is decided by the state agency on the whole file, not by one rule on one page. Nothing here is legal advice, and no one should move, retitle or assign income on the strength of a web page.
Sources
The source above was retrieved and read against the state text on August 27, 2026. Every quotation on this page was checked against those bytes.
Income is only the first of the two Medicaid questions a family in Arkansas faces. The second is what the state can recover after death: Medicaid estate recovery in Arkansas (probate estate only).
Setting up a spend-down usually needs an agent who can sign, and Arkansas sets its own formalities for that document: Arkansas’s power of attorney requirements cover how Arkansas requires the document to be signed and whether durability is the default.