Updated August 27, 2026. Quick answer: Texas policy is current to “Revision 25-1; Effective March 1, 2025”, and it carries an exclusion worth checking before anyone drafts anything: although a QIT can overcome the special income limit for institutional and waiver care, “it is not available to people in Community Attendant Services (CAS) who are income ineligible”. For that programme the trust is simply not a route.
What Texas requires
| What the state sets out | What it says |
|---|---|
| The policy | Revision 25-1; Effective March 1, 2025 |
| Definition | “A qualified income trust (QIT) is an irrevocable trust established for the benefit of a person, the person’s spouse or both.” |
| What may be in it | “The corpus of the trust is composed only of the person’s income, including accumulated income.” |
| Where it does not work | “it is not available to people in Community Attendant Services (CAS) who are income ineligible” |
| State as beneficiary | the trust must include a provision that the state is designated to receive funds remaining |
How it works in practice
- The Community Attendant Services exclusion is the differentiating fact. A QIT works for institutional and Home and Community-Based Services eligibility, but “it is not available to people in Community Attendant Services (CAS) who are income ineligible”. Someone whose plan is built around CAS needs a different answer.
- The corpus rule is strict: “The corpus of the trust is composed only of the person’s income, including accumulated income.” Accumulated income is expressly allowed to remain, which is not true in every state in this series.
- The trust must be irrevocable and for the benefit of the person, their spouse, or both — “A qualified income trust (QIT) is an irrevocable trust established for the benefit of a person, the person’s spouse or both.”
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 Texas record.
What this page does not settle
- Texas revises this handbook passage periodically and the revision number is printed on it. The version read for this page is Revision 25-1; Effective March 1, 2025; a later revision may change the detail.
- This page reads one source: Texas HHSC, MEPD Handbook F-6800, Qualified Income Trust. 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.
Related: Texas’s Medicaid home equity limit for a single applicant with no spouse or dependent child at home.
Related: Texas’s Medicaid Personal Needs Allowance; the amount a nursing-facility resident keeps from their own income each month.