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: Institutional Budgeting states the figure directly.
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, effective page revision marker shown is “08-17” (August 2017); this is the current live URL on KDHE’s site.
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, though it is the current live KDHE URL.
| Citation | Kansas Economic and Employment Support Manual (KEESM) Section 8115: Institutional Budgeting |
| 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” |
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.