Will Medicaid Take the House? A Straight Florida Answer

It is eleven at night, the laptop is open on the kitchen counter, and what you typed is some version of this: if Mom goes into a nursing home, will Medicaid take the house?

The house is usually safe. What puts it at risk is rarely Medicaid. It is what families do to the house before they call anyone. The fear comes from mashing two questions into one: whether your loved one qualifies while living, and whether the state gets paid back after death.

Eligibility: the homestead does not count against you

Florida's Department of Children and Families excludes the homestead as an asset regardless of value. What disqualifies people is countable assets over the limit and income over the cap. Two conditions sit alongside the exclusion.

• Intent to return. Once your loved one enters a facility, the home stays excluded as long as he or she states an intent to return. Florida takes that at face value; it need not be medically likely.
• The home equity limit. If no spouse, no child under 21, and no blind or permanently and totally disabled child lives there, equity above the state standard bars long-term care services: $752,000 as of 2026, reset every January. Equity is market value minus what is owed.

Estate recovery: what can happen afterward

Section 409.9101 creates Florida's Medicaid Estate Recovery Program: a debt for assistance paid after the recipient turned 55, claimed in the probate case. Three features keep it in proportion.

1. 1Recovery runs only through probate. Florida did not adopt the broader federal definition of an estate, so property that never enters probate is not reached.
2. 2The survivor bars. No claim is enforced when the recipient leaves a surviving spouse, a child under 21, or a child who is blind or permanently and totally disabled.
3. 3Homestead is constitutionally protected. No debt is enforced against property exempt from creditors under Florida's constitution. When a homestead descends to a surviving spouse or lineal descendants, that protection carries to them.

The mistake fear makes

This is the part that keeps me up. A family hears that Medicaid will take the house, and that weekend somebody prints a quit claim deed and moves the home to the children. It feels protective. It is usually the costliest thing they will ever do.

• It is an uncompensated transfer inside the sixty month look-back. Florida divides the gift by its transfer divisor, $10,645 per month as of the July 2026 manual, to set a penalty period. A $300,000 home given away buys more than twenty eight months with Medicaid paying nothing toward care.
• Homestead protection from creditors does not travel with a lifetime gift the way it does at death. Once the children own the house, their creditors, divorces, and lawsuits can reach it, and the homestead tax exemption, the Save Our Homes cap, and the step-up in basis at death are all lost.
• And the parent no longer owns what he or she may need to sell to pay for care.

What Florida families do instead

• The Lady Bird deed, or enhanced life estate deed. Your parent keeps the home and the right to sell, mortgage, or revoke it without anyone's permission, and names who receives it at death. Nothing is given away in life, so the look-back generally does not treat it as a transfer, and the home passes outside probate, beyond recovery's reach.
• The caregiver child exception. Federal law permits transferring the home to a son or daughter who lived there at least two years immediately before the parent entered the facility and provided the care that kept the parent home. Proof standards are strict, and families lose this one by documenting it after the fact.
• The transfers already allowed. The home may go to a spouse, to a child under 21 or a blind or permanently and totally disabled child, or to a sibling with an equity interest who lived there the year before institutionalization.

Which one fits depends on who owns the house, who lives in it, who is married, who is disabled, and what has already been signed, and an attorney will know which fits your family.

Where to start tonight

Sign nothing. Write down who is on the deed, who lives there, and what is still owed. Then read our Florida Medicaid Look-Back Guide and our page on planning for aging parents. Then call. Asking early is what saves the house, and an attorney will know which fits your family.