Updated September 17, 2026. Quick answer: In Massachusetts, a Medicaid nursing-facility resident’s Personal Needs Allowance is $72.80/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. 130 CMR 520.026(A)(1), MassHealth Financial Eligibility, Long-Term-Care General Income Deductions states the figure directly.
Why Massachusetts’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. Massachusetts has done exactly that, setting $72.80/Month, effective July 1, 2007 (MassHealth Long-Term-Care Facility Bulletin 96; unchanged since).
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
mass.gov itself returned HTTP 403 on every direct fetch attempted this session; the codified text was independently confirmed through Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute mirror (a verbatim regulation republication, not a paraphrase) and cross-checked against MassHealth Board of Hearings appeal decisions that separately cite the identical figure and section number.
| Federal personal needs allowance floor | $30.00/month |
| Massachusetts’s personal needs allowance | $72.80/Month |
| How far above the federal floor (calculated by comparing this state’s own figure to the $30.00 federal floor) | 143% higher |
| State citation | 130 CMR 520.026(A)(1), MassHealth Financial Eligibility, Long-Term-Care General Income Deductions |
| What it says | “The MassHealth agency deducts $72.80 for a long-term-care resident’s personal-needs allowance (PNA).” |
| Federal floor citation | 42 CFR § 435.725 (the federal $30.00/month personal needs allowance floor) |
Figures verified against 130 CMR 520.026 (as republished by Cornell LII), 42 U.S.C. 1396a(q) and 42 CFR 435.725 on September 30, 2026; mass.gov could not be fetched, so the July 1, 2007 effective date and Bulletin 96 were not re-checked at the source.
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.