SSI Resource Limits

Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: the limits are $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple, and they have not moved since 1989. That sounds impossible to live within until you read what is excluded: your home regardless of value, one car regardless of value, household goods, and more. Most people who assume they are over the limit have counted things the programme does not count.

The limits, and the year they stopped moving

20 C.F.R. §416.1205 sets the countable-resource limits at $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for an individual with an eligible spouse.

The regulation carries a table of effective dates, stepping the limits up through the late 1980s — and the table stops at the row for 1 January 1989. There is no mechanism in the section for annual adjustment. Unlike the benefit rate, which is raised by a cost-of-living notice each year, these figures are frozen in the regulation and have been for over three decades. That is not an interpretation; it is what the section looks like when you read it.

The practical effect is that the resource test has quietly tightened every year since 1989 without anyone changing it, and it is why the exclusions below matter far more than the headline number.

What does not count

This is the part that changes people’s answers, and the regulations are unusually generous and unusually plain.

• Your home. “We do not count a home regardless of its value” (§416.1212(b)). No cap, no equity test for the home you live in.
• One car. “One automobile is totally excluded regardless of value if it is used for transportation for the individual or a member of the individual’s household” (§416.1218). Not one cheap car — one car, whatever it is worth. Second and subsequent vehicles do count.
• Household goods and personal effects. Items “found in or near the home, that are used on a regular basis”, and items “ordinarily worn or carried by the individual” (§416.1216). The exception is things held as investments — collectibles and unworn jewellery bought for their value are still counted.
• Burial spaces for you, your spouse and immediate family, excluded outright.
• Burial funds, up to “an amount not in excess of $1,500 each” for you and a spouse — with conditions that matter, below.

Property essential to self-support, certain life insurance, disaster assistance, tax refunds and several narrower categories are also excluded. If your assets are a house, a car, your possessions and a modest burial fund, it is entirely possible to own all of that and still be under $2,000 in countable resources.

The burial-fund condition people fail

The $1,500 exclusion is real but conditional, and the condition is administrative rather than financial. The funds must be kept separate from all other resources not intended for burial and clearly designated as set aside for burial.

Money mixed into an ordinary savings account does not qualify, even if you have always thought of it as the funeral money and would swear to it. Commingling defeats the exclusion. The fix is free: a separate account, titled and documented for that purpose.

Two reducers to know about. The $1,500 is cut dollar-for-dollar by the face value of any life insurance whose cash value was already excluded, and by amounts held in an irrevocable burial trust. So the exclusions do not stack the way people expect, and arranging burial money is one of the few places where doing more can help less.

ABLE accounts: the one place large savings are allowed

For those eligible for one, an ABLE account is the exception to everything above. Under the ABLE Act, an account balance counts as a resource only “to the extent that such amount exceeds $100,000”.

And the consequence of going over is far softer than the ordinary resource rule. The statute provides that SSI benefits “shall not be terminated, but shall be suspended, by reason of excess resources of the individual attributable to an amount in the ABLE account” — with Medicaid continuing during the suspension. Suspension rather than termination is a genuinely different outcome: benefits resume when the balance comes back down, without a fresh application.

Whether you can open one, and how it compares with a special needs trust, are separate questions this site answers elsewhere: who is now eligible after the age-46 expansion, and ABLE versus a special needs trust.

If an inheritance is the reason you are reading this page, it has its own timing problem and its own trap — what an inheritance does to SSI.

Sources

20 C.F.R. §§416.1205, 416.1210, 416.1212, 416.1216, 416.1218 and 416.1231 at the Legal Information Institute; the ABLE resource treatment from Pub. L. 113-295 §103, the statutory note to 26 U.S.C. §529A. All read 2026-08-06.

Sourcing note: the ABLE $100,000 threshold is cited to the ABLE Act note rather than to 42 U.S.C. §1382b, which we checked and which does not contain it. Honest gap: no benefit amount appears in this wing because the federal benefit rate is set by annual notice and ssa.gov refused every request we made for it.

See methodology and corrections. General information about published regulations, not legal or benefits advice. No advertising appears on this page and nothing is sold on it.