Assisted living in Georgia runs about $5,300 a month, and a semi-private nursing home room about $8,821. Georgia comes in below the national median in every care category but private duty nursing, and those are still large monthly bills. Paying for senior care here means combining what you have with what Medicare, Georgia Medicaid, and VA benefits will cover.

In This Guide

What Senior Care Costs in Georgia

Before choosing how to pay, you need the price tag. The figures below come from the 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey, released March 2, 2026 from rates collected July through November 2025. Every annual figure rests on a usage assumption, and they are not the same one, so the assumption is named in each row: in-home care at 44 hours a week, adult day health care at 5 days a week, private duty nursing at just one hour a week, and nursing home care at 365 days.

Care Type Georgia (Monthly) Georgia (Annual) National (Annual)
In-home care, non-medical caregiver (44 hrs/week) $6,101 $73,216 $80,080
In-home skilled nursing, private duty nurse (only 1 hr/week) $425 $5,096 $4,680
Adult day health care (5 days/week) $1,950 $23,400 $24,700
Assisted living (private one bedroom) $5,300 $63,600 $74,400
Nursing home, semi-private (365 days) $8,821 $105,850 $114,975
Nursing home, private (365 days) $9,429 $113,150 $129,575

Georgia is below the national median in every category but one. Assisted living runs about $63,600 a year in Georgia against a national figure of about $74,400, and a semi-private nursing home room about $105,850 against $114,975. In-home care works out to about $32 an hour at the survey's 44-hour week, under the $35 national rate. The exception is private duty nursing in the home, where Georgia runs above national: about $98 an hour against a $90 national median, though Georgia's $135 per-visit rate sits below the $160 national one. Below the national median still means real money: at $8,821 a month, two years in a Georgia nursing home runs past $200,000.

What Medicare Covers (and What It Doesn't)

This is where families get surprised. Medicare does not pay for long-term care, which Medicare also calls custodial care: help with daily activities such as bathing, dressing and using the bathroom. Medicare's own explanation is that most long-term care is non-medical, and you pay all costs for most of it.

What Medicare Part A does cover is skilled and medical care:

  • Skilled nursing facility care for up to 100 days in each benefit period, after a qualifying inpatient hospital stay of at least 3 days in a row and when a doctor says you need daily skilled care. For 2026 you pay $0 a day for days 1 through 20 after the $1,736 Part A deductible, which you usually already paid during the hospital stay, then $217 a day for days 21 through 100, and all costs after that.,
  • Some home health care.
  • Hospice care, including the care needed to manage a terminal illness.

What Medicare does not cover is long-term care in any setting it is delivered: at home, in the community, in an assisted living facility, or in a nursing home once skilled care ends. That includes help with daily activities, home-delivered meals, adult day health care and transportation.

For how Medicare works in Georgia, including Advantage plans, Medigap, and help paying premiums, see our Medicare plans and coverage guide for Georgia. Medicare itself points to Medicaid, for those who meet their state's rules, and private long-term care insurance as the ways to cover long-term care.

Georgia Medicaid for Long-Term Care

Georgia Medicaid pays for long-term care through two main channels: nursing facility (institutional) Medicaid and home and community-based waiver services. Two points shape who gets it.

First, Georgia Medicaid reaches adults through several separate programs rather than one income test. Long-term care runs through the aged, blind and disabled pathways, but those are not the only door: Georgia also runs Right from the Start Medical Assistance, a postpartum coverage extension, Planning for Healthy Babies, and Georgia Pathways to Coverage, so don't conclude from the long-term-care rules that a younger adult in the family is ineligible. Pathways is not traditional Medicaid: Georgia describes it as coverage for residents who "meet program requirements and are not otherwise eligible for traditional Medicaid," and it is conditioned on reporting qualifying-activity hours at application and annual renewal. The accepted activities include community service as relative caregiving, which is worth knowing if you are the one doing the caring. That requirement applies to Pathways only, not to people enrolled in traditional Medicaid, and Georgia has announced that Pathways eligibility requirements change January 1, 2027.

Second, long-term care Medicaid runs through two different channels with very different rules.

Nursing Home (Institutional) Medicaid

Nursing facility Medicaid is both income-tested and asset-tested, and the income test carries a federal ceiling. For 2026, federal rules cap a state's long-term-care special income level at 300 percent of the SSI federal benefit rate, which works out to $2,982 a month, and the SSI resource standard for an individual is $2,000. A state may set its own limit at or below that ceiling, never above it. Georgia publishes its own figures, the ones to plan against. The Division of Family and Children Services Medicaid Policy Manual, Appendix A1, effective July 2026, sets the Medicaid Cap for living arrangement D, Georgia's class for a person in a nursing home, at $2,982 a month for an individual, and the countable-resource limit at $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple. The same chart prints a $5,964 couple cap, but Georgia uses it only when both spouses of a Medicaid couple live together in living arrangement D, at home or in the same nursing home, nursing-home hospice or hospital, and the individual cap would leave one of them ineligible. Otherwise each applicant is tested alone against $2,982, with the spouse's income left out. So if your parent's spouse is staying at home, only your parent's income is measured. Two more qualifiers matter. The income figure is tested against gross income: Georgia's Medicaid Cap budgeting policy tells the caseworker to "Compare the GROSS countable monthly income to the Individual Medicaid CAP" and to "Do not allow the income deductions discussed in Section 2505, Income Deductions." Nothing comes off the top before that comparison, so a parent bringing in $2,995 a month gross is over the $2,982 cap, not under it. And if your parent is married and their spouse is staying at home, $2,000 is not the number: Appendix A1's spousal-impoverishment row puts that couple's countable resources at $162,660 plus $2,000, or $164,660. Georgia adds that these limits may be higher than the limits for other Medicaid programs, and that functional status, age, citizenship, medical needs and Georgia residency are weighed too. When Medicaid pays for a nursing home, it covers room, board, and care together. The resident contributes nearly all monthly income toward the cost of care and keeps a small personal needs allowance.

Over the cap, Georgia's manual points to two routes rather than one, and the difference between them decides whether the nursing home gets paid. The first is a Qualified Income Trust, often called a Miller trust. An applicant whose gross income is at or above the Medicaid Cap and who has not established one is income ineligible under any living-arrangement-D class of assistance until they do, and Georgia's trust policy describes the trust as a way of "sheltering all or a portion of their income from the eligibility income limit test." The trust must be made up only of the applicant's income, with no resources in it, and must be irrevocable. When the applicant dies, what is left in it goes to the Department of Community Health, up to the amount Medicaid spent on their care. It cannot be backdated: it takes effect in the month everyone required has signed it. And it must be set up in Georgia, because a trust established in another state cannot be used to qualify for Georgia Medicaid. The second route is ABD Medically Needy. Georgia instructs the caseworker to budget an over-cap applicant that way, determining ABD Medicaid eligibility under the ABD Medically Needy Income Level, and says in the same instruction that "Medicaid will not cover the vendor payment to the nursing home." So Medically Needy is a real route to ABD Medicaid, but it is not a substitute for nursing-home coverage: our Georgia Medicaid Medically Needy guide walks through what that route does and does not do.

For the full picture, read our Georgia Medicaid long-term care guide.

Home and Community-Based Waivers: CCSP and SOURCE

If the goal is to keep a parent at home, Georgia's Elderly and Disabled Waiver Program delivers home and community-based services through two programs:

Both require a nursing facility level of care. The income test is the same Medicaid Cap used for a nursing home: Georgia's manual applies its Medicaid Cap budget to the Elderly and Disabled Waiver Program, against gross countable income, with the Qualified Income Trust route open at or above the cap. Waiver enrollment can also be capped. Federal rules require a state to say how many people each waiver will serve in a year, make that number a limit on the program's size, and contemplate the state keeping a list of people waiting to enroll. We found no Georgia-published slot count or waiting-list figure for CCSP or SOURCE, so ask your Area Agency on Aging what the wait looks like where your parent lives.

Read the deeper guides on the CCSP waiver and the SOURCE waiver, and check the rules in our Georgia Medicaid eligibility and income limits guide.

Not sure which Medicaid path fits your parent? Chat with Brevy's care navigator at brevy.com.

Paying for Assisted Living in Georgia

Assisted living is where the room-and-board rule trips people up. Georgia Medicaid does not pay for room and board in an assisted living community or personal care home. The CCSP and SOURCE waivers cover the care services delivered in those settings, but not the rent, meals, and lodging itself. That limit is federal: under 42 CFR 441.310, federal Medicaid funding is not available for room and board in a home and community-based waiver, apart from two narrow exceptions (respite care in a state-approved facility, and part of the rent and food of an unrelated paid caregiver who lives with the person) that do not reach ordinary assisted living.

So a waiver participant living in a licensed personal care home pays the facility a room-and-board amount out of their own income, such as a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check. Confirm the current amount with your CCSP or SOURCE care coordinator or the Georgia Division of Aging Services.

That makes the math for assisted living look like this for a Medicaid-eligible person: the waiver covers the care, the resident's own income covers room and board. For someone not on Medicaid, that split does not apply, and the whole bill, about $5,300 a month at Georgia's median, has to be covered some other way.

VA Aid and Attendance for Veterans

If your parent is a wartime veteran or a qualifying survivor of one, VA Aid and Attendance may pay monthly toward their needs. It is not a separate check added on top of the VA basic pension. It is a higher maximum pension rate that replaces the basic rate: $29,093 a year for a veteran with no dependents, against a basic rate of $17,441.

The care-need test has four routes, and only one has to be true: your parent needs another person's help with daily activities like bathing, feeding and dressing; has to stay in bed, or spend a large part of the day in bed, because of illness; is in a nursing home because of lost mental or physical abilities related to a disability; or has eyesight limited to 5/200 or less in both eyes even with glasses, or a visual field of 5 degrees or less.

For the rate year running December 1, 2025 through November 30, 2026, the maximum is:

The VA publishes those as annual amounts, so the monthly equivalents, about $2,424 and $2,874, are the annual figures divided by twelve. And they are ceilings rather than payments: the VA pays the difference between the income it counts and that limit, so a veteran with other income receives less than the maximum, and some receive nothing. Budget from the award letter, not from the ceiling. The VA also says non-reimbursable medical expenses may reduce income for VA purposes, so paying out of pocket for care can help a parent qualify, or qualify for more.

To qualify, the applicant must meet wartime service, age-or-disability, care-need, income, and net-worth tests. The 2026 net-worth limit is $163,699, and it is not a test of savings alone: the net-worth figure counts assets and annual income for VA purposes together, so measuring a bank balance against $163,699 gives the wrong answer. It does not count the home you live in, your car, or basic home items you would not take with you if you moved. A spouse's net worth counts toward the same limit, and the VA applies a 3-year look-back on asset transfers.

The Georgia Department of Veterans Service has accredited Veterans Service Officers who help with claims and appeals, and the VA says the services an accredited VSO representative provides on your claim are always free. That guarantee covers VSO representatives only: the VA also warns that an accredited attorney or claims agent can charge fees, so ask before anyone else files for you.

If your parent has a VA disability rating, our guide to Georgia disabled veteran benefits by VA rating covers the state benefits tied to it.

Other Ways to Pay for Senior Care in Georgia

When government programs don't cover everything, these are the other options to weigh, each with its cautions:

  • Long-term care insurance. This private insurance covers custodial care that health insurance does not. A policy pays only once a benefit trigger is met, usually needing help with two or more of six daily activities or a cognitive impairment, as assessed by the insurer, and an elimination period has passed, during which the policyholder pays for any care received. Most policies then pay up to a daily limit until a lifetime maximum is reached. If your parent has a policy, read those terms now. Most individual policies require medical underwriting, so someone in poor health or already receiving care may not qualify for a new one.
  • Home equity and reverse mortgages. A Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) is the only reverse mortgage insured by the federal government. The borrower must be 62 or older, live in the home as a principal residence, and get counseling from a HUD-approved reverse mortgage counseling agency before receiving the loan. The balance grows each month and is usually repaid by selling the home. And if the borrower spends more than 12 consecutive months in a nursing home or assisted living facility with no co-borrower living in the home, anyone else living there must move out unless they can repay the loan or qualify as an Eligible Non-Borrowing Spouse.
  • Life insurance. Some policies carry an accelerated death benefit, usually only if it was on the policy before the insured became terminally ill, and a policy can be sold in a life settlement. Either move can affect taxes and Medicaid or SSI eligibility, so check before acting.
  • Local help. Georgia has twelve Area Agencies on Aging, each serving a set of counties; you find yours by the county your parent lives in.

If you are thinking about moving money to qualify for Medicaid, know the look-back first. Federal law looks back 60 months (five years) from the Medicaid application at transfers for less than fair market value, and one inside that window can bring a penalty period in which Medicaid will not pay for long-term care, though some transfers, such as to a spouse, are exempt. Georgia's DFCS manual works from the same 60-month look-back period and divides the uncompensated value by an average Georgia nursing-home private-pay rate to set the penalty months. Talk to a Georgia elder law attorney before moving money. Our Georgia Medicaid asset spend-down guide covers the rules.

Where to Get Free Help

You do not have to sort out the Medicare side alone. GeorgiaCares, Georgia's State Health Insurance Assistance Program, gives Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers free, unbiased help with Medicare health and drug plans, comparing coverage, enrolling, reviewing medical notices, managing bills, and applying for programs that lower Medicare costs, such as Medicare Savings Programs and Extra Help. GeorgiaCares is not affiliated with any insurance company and does not sell insurance.

Call GeorgiaCares at 1-866-552-4464 and select option 4, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Medicare pay for assisted living or nursing home care in Georgia?

Not for long-term care. Medicare does not pay for long-term custodial care in an assisted living facility, a nursing home, or anywhere else. Part A covers skilled nursing facility care for up to 100 days per benefit period after a qualifying 3-day inpatient hospital stay, plus hospice and some home health care. For long-term care, Medicare points to Medicaid, for those who meet their state's rules, and private long-term care insurance.

What is the income limit for Georgia nursing home Medicaid in 2026?

Georgia publishes both figures itself, in DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Appendix A1, effective July 2026: for living arrangement D, the nursing-home class, a Medicaid Cap of $2,982 a month for an individual, and a countable-resource limit of $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple. The $2,982 is compared to gross countable monthly income, with the manual's income deductions not allowed first. A married applicant whose spouse stays at home is tested alone against it, with the spouse's income left out, and is measured against Georgia's spousal-impoverishment resource figure of $164,660 rather than $2,000. An applicant at or above the cap has two routes rather than none: establish a Qualified Income Trust, or be budgeted as ABD Medically Needy, under which Georgia says Medicaid "will not cover the vendor payment to the nursing home."

Will Georgia Medicaid pay for assisted living?

Medicaid does not pay for room and board in assisted living or a personal care home. The CCSP and SOURCE waivers pay for the care services in those settings, while the resident pays the facility a room-and-board amount from their own income. Federal rules also let waiver enrollment be capped, and we found no Georgia-published slot count or waiting-list figure for CCSP or SOURCE, so ask about the wait.

Can a veteran use VA benefits to pay for senior care in Georgia?

Yes, if they qualify. VA Aid and Attendance pays monthly to qualified wartime veterans and survivors, and it is a higher maximum rate of the VA pension, not an amount added on top of it. The maximum is $29,093 a year for a veteran with no dependents, about $2,424 a month when divided by 12, and $34,488 with one dependent. That maximum is a ceiling: the VA pays the difference between the income it counts and the limit, so a veteran with other income receives less, though non-reimbursable medical expenses such as care a family pays for may reduce countable income. Help from an accredited Veterans Service Officer representative is always free; an accredited attorney or claims agent can charge fees.

Learn More

FinancialGeorgia Senior Property Tax ReliefHow Georgia senior property tax relief works: the $2,000 homestead exemption, the age-62 and 65 breaks, the income test, and the county exemptions worth most. FinancialGeorgia Retirement Income TaxGeorgia residents 65 or older can exclude up to $65,000 of retirement income ($35,000 at 62 to 64) under the 2025 IT-511 booklet. Social Security is not taxed. MedicaidGeorgia Medicaid: The Brevy Pillar GuideGeorgia Medicaid 2026: income and asset limits, the EDWP waiver (CCSP and SOURCE), Pathways to Coverage, Miller Trusts, estate recovery, and how to apply. MedicaidGeorgia Medicaid Long-Term CareGeorgia Medicaid long-term care in 2026: nursing facility coverage, HCBS waivers (EDWP with CCSP and SOURCE, ICWP, NOW, COMP), PACE, and how to apply. MedicaidThe Georgia CCSP WaiverGeorgia CCSP Waiver 2026: who qualifies for the Community Care Services Program, what it covers, and how to apply through your Area Agency on Aging. MedicaidThe Georgia SOURCE WaiverHow the Georgia SOURCE waiver works in 2026: a delivery model inside the 1915(c) Elderly and Disabled Waiver Program, eligibility, sites, and how to apply. MedicaidGeorgia Medicaid Eligibility and Income LimitsGeorgia Medicaid income limits in 2026: the $994 ABD limit, $2,982 long-term-care cap, $2,000 asset limit, Miller Trust, CSRA, and Pathways to Coverage. MedicareMedicare Plans and Coverage in GeorgiaMedicare in Georgia for 2026: Part A, Part B, Medicare Advantage, Part D, Medigap rules, and the programs that help pay your Medicare costs. FinancialHow to Pay for Senior CareHow to pay for senior care: what it costs nationally and how Medicaid, Medicare, VA benefits, and private pay each fit. Who qualifies, what's covered, in 2026.

Find personalized help paying for senior care in Georgia at brevy.com.

The information on Brevy.com is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional legal, financial, or medical advice. Rules vary by state and program and change frequently. Always verify with the relevant agency or a qualified professional. Brevy is not a law firm, financial advisor, or healthcare provider.

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Expert eldercare guidance from Brevy's team of healthcare professionals and researchers.