Wyoming Medicaid Penalty Divisor: $10,114 a Month

Updated August 27, 2026. Quick answer: Wyoming’s rules (Chapter 18) regulate the transfer penalty in unusual detail but do not state the divisor; the Department’s Eligibility Operations Manual does: M804 says to divide the uncompensated value by the average private pay rate, and Table 1A lists it as $10,114 (effective January 1, 2026). Chapter 18 of the Wyoming Medicaid Rules, effective May 23, 2025, devotes a whole subsection to Transfer of Resources — presumption, rebuttal, return of the asset, hardship waiver — and never says what the uncompensated value is divided by. All thirty-seven current Medicaid chapters were read for this page and none of them states a divisor; the promulgated rules do not state one, but the manual does, at $10,114 a month (Table 1A, effective January 1, 2026).

What Wyoming publishes

How the penalty period is calculated

• Wyoming states the presumption before anything else: “It is presumed that a transfer of an individual’s resource for less than fair market value was made for the purpose of qualifying for Medicaid unless convincing evidence is submitted to the Department that the resource was transferred exclusively for some other reason.” The burden of rebutting that presumption is the individual’s.
• What counts as being paid is defined narrowly. For a resource to have been transferred for fair market value or valuable consideration, “the compensation received for the resource shall be in a tangible form with intrinsic value”, and “a transfer for love and consideration is not considered a transfer at fair market value.”
• Care given by a family member before any agreement was written is treated as a gift. Services provided free at the time “were intended to be provided without compensation”, and paying for them afterwards is “presumed a transfer for less than fair market value”. The rebuttal requires evidence that was in writing AT THE TIME the services were provided. Chapter 18 defines a Personal Care Contract for exactly this reason.
• Giving the asset back works, once. “A transfer penalty shall not be imposed if the transferred resource is returned to the individual”, and a one-time return or partial return — to the individual or paid directly to a provider — can reduce or eliminate the penalty. But money returned to pay a lawyer during a contested case does not count: “Attorney’s fees are the sole responsibility of the individual.”
• The hardship waiver is mandatory when its test is met: the Department “shall waive a transfer penalty if imposing the penalty would result in undue hardship”. Undue hardship means the penalty would deprive the person of food, clothing, shelter or other necessities, or of medical care such that health or life would be endangered — AND one of three things is true: the recipient of the transfer cannot be located after all attempts are exhausted; the transfer was theft, fraud or financial exploitation reported and pursued through Adult Protective Services or law enforcement; or all reasonable legal means of recovery have been exhausted. A hardship request uses the Department’s form and, where applicable, a physician statement.
• One sentence in Chapter 18 is easy to miss and expensive: during a transfer-of-resource penalty, “income deductions for medical or remedial care expenses… are limited to zero.” The penalty is not only a period without Medicaid payment; it also closes off the deduction that would otherwise reduce what the person owes.

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

What this page does not settle

• No Wyoming Medicaid rule states a divisor, but the Department’s Eligibility Operations Manual lists the average private pay rate as $10,114 a month (Table 1A, effective January 1, 2026). The negative claim about the rules was made across the WHOLE body of rules, not one chapter: all 37 current chapters of the Medicaid program were retrieved and scanned — roughly 900,000 characters — and none contains the word divisor, a period of ineligibility, a look-back, or an average daily or monthly private-pay cost used to compute a penalty.
• Chapter 1 does define “Private pay rate”, and it is the wrong figure for this purpose. The definition — “the published semi-private routine daily rates a nursing facility charges to non-recipients, other than Medicare clients, after all discounts, allowances and subsidies are subtracted…” — is a per-facility rate-setting input used in Chapter 7, Nursing Facility Payment and Assessment. It is not a statewide average and Chapter 18 never points at it.
• Where the number lives is stated in the rules themselves, just not the number: Chapter 18, Section 2(c) provides that “the Department may issue manuals and bulletins to interpret this Chapter”, subordinate to the Chapter. A divisor published that way is administered rather than promulgated, which is why a rules search cannot find it.
• Chapter 18 as it stands is recent, not neglected. The version read for this page took effect on May 23, 2025 and the immediately preceding version was also fetched and compared; the transfer provisions are substantially the same in both.
• Nothing here tells you whether a particular gift is penalised. Wyoming starts from a presumption that it was made to qualify for Medicaid, and rebutting that is a matter of evidence in a specific file.

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

• Wyoming Department of Health, Eligibility Operations Manual, Table 1A, Average Private Pay rate $10,114, effective January 1, 2026
• Wyoming Department of Health, Eligibility Operations Manual, M804, Determining Resource Transfer Penalties
• Wyoming Administrative Rules, Department of Health (048), Medicaid (0037) — the current rule set, including Chapter 18, Medicaid Eligibility, effective May 23, 2025
• Wyoming Administrative Rules, the Secretary of State’s rules portal — the search this page’s 37-chapter scan was run through

The rules sources above were retrieved and read against the state text on August 27, 2026, and the Eligibility Operations Manual pages were read on October 25, 2026. Every figure on this page was checked against those bytes.