Updated September 6, 2026. Quick answer: In Kansas, a Medicaid nursing-facility resident’s Personal Needs Allowance is $62.00/Month; the amount of their own income they keep for personal use each month, with the rest going to the facility as the patient-pay amount toward the cost of care. That is well above the $30/month federal floor set in 1988 and never raised since. Kansas Economic and Employment Support Manual (KEESM) Section 8115: Resident Status Review states the figure in its August 2017 revision.
Why Kansas’s figure isn’t the federal floor
Federal Medicaid law requires only a $30-a-month personal needs allowance as a floor; a state is free to set its own, higher figure by statute, regulation, or agency policy. Kansas has done exactly that, setting $62.00/Month, per the August 2017 revision (marker “08-17”) of KEESM section 8115; later KDHE revisions of section 8115 (March 2020, May 2021 and April 2022) no longer print that sentence, and K.S.A. 39-972 requires only an amount of not less than $60, so $62 is the last figure we could read in a state manual.
What the allowance covers, and what it doesn’t
The personal needs allowance pays for the things a facility’s daily rate doesn’t cover: clothing, haircuts, snacks, a phone or television, small personal purchases. It is deducted before the rest of a resident’s income is applied to the facility bill as the patient-pay (or post-eligibility treatment of income, PETI) amount. It is not extra money on top of what Medicaid already pays the facility; it is the one slice of a resident’s own income that Medicaid rules guarantee the resident, not the facility, keeps.
One exception or caveat worth knowing
The confirmed passage states the $62 figure inside a spousal-budgeting example rather than as a freestanding single-resident definition; three other KEESM sections checked (8172, 8144, 8112) contained no standalone dollar figure. The page’s own revision marker (2017) is older than ideal for a 2026 figure, and the cited URL is the archived August 2017 output of section 8115.
| Citation | Kansas Economic and Employment Support Manual (KEESM) Section 8115: Resident Status Review |
| What it says | “one spouse’s income falls below the $62 personal needs allowance … providing a total $124 needs allowance of which up to $62 can be provided to the spouse with insufficient income” |
Figures verified against KEESM sections 8115 and 7430 (Kansas Department of Health and Environment, August 2017 output, an archived revision) and 42 U.S.C. 1396a(q) on September 30, 2026.
Every citation on this page was read directly from the state’s own Medicaid agency, administrative code, or official eligibility manual this session. General information, not legal or financial advice; a figure this specific can change with a budget cycle or a rule amendment, and a facility or state caseworker has the final say on any individual case.
Related: use the Medicaid spend-down calculator to estimate how much you would need to spend down to qualify for long-term-care Medicaid in your state.