VA Aid & Attendance Rates Went Up for 2026: What Florida Veterans Get Now
If you have already read our guide on using VA benefits to pay for assisted living, here are the numbers to plug in for this year. Aid & Attendance pension rates went up 2.8% for the cost-of-living cycle that runs from December 1, 2025 through November 30, 2026, and a lot of families researching this benefit are still working from older figures.
The 2026 Aid & Attendance numbers
Aid & Attendance is a tax-free, needs-based pension add-on for wartime veterans and surviving spouses who need help with daily activities. It does not need to be repaid, and it can be used for in-home care, assisted living, memory care, or skilled nursing, not just medical expenses. For the current cycle, the maximum monthly amounts are:
- Single veteran: up to $2,424 per month
- Married veteran, with a spouse or dependent: up to $2,874 per month
- Surviving spouse: up to $1,558 per month
These are maximums. Actual payments depend on income, assets, and documented care needs, which is where most families either overestimate or underestimate what they will actually receive.
Who actually qualifies
Three things have to line up.
Service requirement: at least 90 days of active duty, with at least one day during a recognized wartime period, and a discharge that was honorable or other than dishonorable. Surviving spouses qualify if they were married to the veteran for at least one year before the veteran's death, or had a child together, and have not remarried (remarriage after age 57 does not disqualify a surviving spouse).
Care need: the veteran or spouse must need help with at least two activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, or mobility, or require supervision due to a cognitive condition like dementia, or be a nursing home resident due to a disability, or have severe vision loss.
Financial limit: net worth (assets plus annual income) cannot exceed $163,699 for 2026. This is where the benefit gets misunderstood. Unreimbursed medical expenses, including the full monthly cost of assisted living or memory care, can be deducted from countable income before that limit is applied. For a lot of families, that deduction is the difference between looking ineligible on paper and actually qualifying.
There is also a three-year look-back period on asset transfers, in effect since October 2018, so moving assets to qualify shortly before applying can backfire.
Why most eligible veterans never apply
Industry estimates suggest only about a quarter of eligible veterans and surviving spouses actually apply for Aid & Attendance. Some have never heard of it. Others assume the income and asset limits rule them out without realizing how much unreimbursed care costs can reduce countable income. Veterans service organizations like the VFW, American Legion, and DAV will help with the application at no cost, and getting that paperwork right matters, since errors and missing documentation are the most common reasons claims get delayed.
What this means for paying for care in Florida
Aid & Attendance alone will not cover the full cost of assisted living in most of the state. Florida assisted living typically runs between $3,500 and $4,500 a month, and even the maximum married-veteran benefit of $2,874 a month leaves a gap. But stacked with Social Security, a VA pension, or a Medicaid waiver, it is often enough to make the difference between a facility that fits the budget and one that does not.
For the full breakdown of how Aid & Attendance interacts with other VA programs and how to start the application, our original guide to VA benefits for assisted living walks through it in more detail. Once you have a sense of the budget, you can browse licensed facilities by city to see what is actually available near your family.
Bottom line
The rates went up, the qualification rules did not change, and the most common mistake is still assuming the asset and income limits disqualify a family before actually running the unreimbursed medical expense deduction. If you ruled yourself out a year or two ago using older numbers, it is worth running this again with the 2026 rates.
Sources: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, va.gov; Patriot Angels, "2026 Aid and Attendance Benefit Rates"; U.S. News & World Report, "How to Use VA Benefits for Assisted Living: A 2026 Guide for Veterans & Spouses," April 2026.