VA Aid and Attendance for In-Home Care in Minnesota

VA Aid and Attendance can help pay for in-home care in Minnesota, turning a monthly VA pension into real money toward an aide, a homemaker, or a family caregiver. If your loved one is a wartime veteran who needs help with daily activities, this benefit can cover a meaningful share of the cost of staying at home. The hard part is usually knowing it exists and how to claim it.

This guide walks through what in-home care costs in Minnesota, how much Aid and Attendance pays, how your care costs can actually help you qualify, and where to get free help applying.

In This Guide

• Key Takeaways
• How Much In-Home Care Costs in Minnesota
• How Aid and Attendance Helps Pay for In-Home Care in Minnesota
• How Minnesota In-Home Care Costs Lower Your Countable Income for Aid and Attendance
• Who Qualifies
• Using Aid and Attendance to Pay a Family Caregiver
• How Aid and Attendance Works with Minnesota Medicaid
• How to Apply and Get Free Help
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Learn More

How Much In-Home Care Costs in Minnesota

Staying at home is not the cheap option in Minnesota. In its 2025 Cost of Care Survey, CareScout merged the former homemaker and home health aide categories into a single non-medical caregiver rate, and puts Minnesota at about $100,672 a year, roughly $8,389 a month or about $44 an hour, against a national median of about $80,080 a year (about $35 an hour for 44 hours a week).2 That is the sixth-highest in-home rate in the country.2 Minnesota assisted living, by comparison, runs roughly $77,790 to $78,870 a year (CareScout publishes both figures for the state) and a semi-private nursing home room about $127,750.2 These are industry-survey medians, not government figures. CareScout collects its rates by metropolitan area and cautions that actual costs vary with care needs, provider availability, and local market conditions, so what your community charges can sit well above or below the state median.2

For many Minnesota families, that is well beyond what a fixed retirement income can absorb on its own. This is where Aid and Attendance comes in.

How Aid and Attendance Helps Pay for In-Home Care in Minnesota

Aid and Attendance is an increased monthly VA pension for wartime veterans and surviving spouses who need help with everyday activities.4 The VA pays it as an increase added to the veteran's monthly payment, either a VA pension or monthly compensation, so it reaches the household as money the family can put toward a home health aide, a homemaker, or a caregiver. On the pension route, that increase takes the form of a higher maximum annual pension rate that replaces the basic rate, not a second payment on top of it.3

The VA publishes these ceilings as annual amounts. The monthly payment is figured from them: the VA subtracts your countable income from the applicable rate, divides the remainder by 12, and rounds down to the whole dollar.1 Read them as ceilings: the VA bases the payment on the difference between your income for VA purposes and the applicable maximum annual pension rate, so a household with other countable income receives less than the table shows.1 Even so, against a Minnesota in-home care bill of about $100,672 a year, a benefit that can reach $29,093 a year covers a meaningful share.2,1

How Minnesota In-Home Care Costs Lower Your Countable Income for Aid and Attendance

VA Pension, including the Aid and Attendance increase, is needs-based: to be eligible, your yearly family income and net worth must meet limits set by Congress.1 The lower the income the VA counts, the better your position.

Here is the part families miss: medical expenses, including in-home care, lower the income the VA counts. The expense has to be unreimbursed to be deductible at all, and you can only deduct the portion above 5% of your applicable Maximum Annual Pension Rate (MAPR), counting the increase for family members but not the increase for aid and attendance or housebound status. For 2026 that floor is $872 a year for a veteran with no spouse or child, and it rises if you have dependents.1

In-home care carries its own conditions, and they are worth getting right before you file. Payments for help with activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living by an in-home attendant are medical expenses as long as the attendant provides the person with health care or custodial care, and the payments must be commensurate with the number of hours the provider actually attends to them.1 The attendant must be a health care provider, unless the person needs aid and attendance or is housebound, or a physician, physician assistant, certified nurse practitioner, or clinical nurse specialist states in writing that, because of a physical, mental, developmental, or cognitive disorder, the person requires the health care or custodial care that the in-home attendant provides.1 So a family hiring an unlicensed aide should expect to show either that the person needs aid and attendance or is housebound, or that written clinician statement.

Think of it in annual terms. If a veteran with no spouse or child pays for in-home care that meets those conditions, only the first $872 of that yearly cost is not deductible; everything above that floor reduces the income the VA counts.1 With non-medical caregiver care running about $100,672 a year in Minnesota, that deduction can be large enough that someone whose income looked too high ends up qualifying.2 Keep the caregiver's hours and invoices, and the clinician's written statement if you need one, so the deduction is documented from the start.

Who Qualifies

To be eligible for Aid and Attendance, the veteran must:4

• Not have received a dishonorable discharge4
• Meet one of the wartime service paths the VA lists for when their service began. Active duty that started before September 8, 1980: at least 90 days of active duty with at least one day during a wartime period. Enlisted service that started after September 7, 1980: at least 24 months (with some exceptions), or the full period for which they were called or ordered to active duty, again with at least one day during wartime. Service that started as an officer after October 16, 1981, where the veteran had not previously served on active duty for at least 24 months, is the VA's third path.4,1
• Meet at least one of the VA's four alternatives on the age and disability test: be at least 65 years old, have a permanent and total disability, be a patient in a nursing home for long-term care because of a disability, or be getting Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income. Any one of the four satisfies the test, so a wartime veteran under 65 who receives SSI qualifies here without an adjudicated permanent-and-total rating.4
• Have a need for aid and attendance. The criteria include an inability to dress or undress or to keep oneself ordinarily clean and presentable, a frequent need to adjust special prosthetic or orthopedic appliances, an inability to feed oneself, an inability to attend to the wants of nature, or a physical or mental incapacity requiring care or assistance on a regular basis to protect against hazards of daily life. Being bedridden qualifies, as does being a patient in a nursing home because of a loss of mental or physical abilities related to a disability, or eyesight limited to 5/200 or less in both eyes or a visual field contracted to 5 degrees or less.4
• Have a net worth below $163,699 for 20264 The calculation includes the claimant's and dependents' assets and income for VA purposes, and assets exclude the primary residence, the car, and basic home items like appliances.1

The VA also reviews assets transferred for less than fair market value in the 36 months (3 years) before it receives the claim, and a transfer inside that window that would otherwise have pushed net worth over the limit can trigger a penalty period of up to 5 years.4 Surviving spouses of wartime veterans can qualify under the Survivors Pension, with a 2026 Aid and Attendance rate of $18,697 a year for a surviving spouse with no dependents and the same $163,699 net worth limit.1

Using Aid and Attendance to Pay a Family Caregiver

Many families want a son, daughter, or other relative to provide the care. Because Aid and Attendance is added to the veteran's monthly VA payment, the household can put that money toward a caregiver.3 A relative providing the care does not stand in the way of the benefit itself: under 38 CFR 3.352(c), care given by a relative or another member of the household will not prevent the VA from granting the Aid and Attendance allowance.4

There is also a separate VA program built for this. Veteran-Directed Care gives an enrolled veteran a flexible budget, managed by the veteran or a representative, to hire and supervise their own workers, including family, friends, or neighbors.5 VA medical centers deliver it through aging and disability network agencies, such as area agencies on aging, whose options counselor helps with assessment and care planning and arranges fiscal management services.5 A veteran is eligible if they are eligible for VA community care, meet the clinical criteria, and the program is available, so ask your VA medical center whether it offers Veteran-Directed Care in your area.5

How Aid and Attendance Works with Minnesota Medicaid

For Minnesota seniors who also need Medical Assistance, the state's Medicaid program administered by the Department of Human Services, to help pay for long-term care, the two programs interact.6 Not every state treats Aid and Attendance the same way, and in Minnesota this is the detail to get right. Under Minnesota's Medical Assistance eligibility policy for the aged, blind, and disabled, VA Aid and Attendance benefits are counted as income and are not excluded, and Minnesota's Eligibility Policy Manual states that they are not excluded even for a person receiving SSI.6 Not all states count Aid and Attendance this way, so guidance written for the country as a whole can be wrong here.6

Once a Minnesota resident is on Medical Assistance for long-term care, the county runs a long-term care income calculation, and the Department of Human Services' manual describes the resulting spenddown as the amount a person must contribute toward the cost of care while living in a long-term care facility.6 Federal post-eligibility rules reinforce that second step. The version that reaches Minnesota is 42 CFR 435.733, the rule for states like Minnesota that use at least one eligibility criterion more restrictive than SSI, rather than the parallel 42 CFR 435.725 written for SSI states. Under it, income disregarded when eligibility was determined must still be considered in the share-of-cost calculation, so under the federal rule an Aid and Attendance amount the VA is still paying at the full rate can count toward what the resident owes the facility. Minnesota already counts Aid and Attendance when it decides eligibility, but how the state treats a full-rate amount in the share-of-cost step is a question to confirm with the Department of Human Services or the county eligibility worker. Incurred medical expenses are only one of five deductions that come off first. Before the agency reduces its payment to the nursing facility, 42 CFR 435.733(c) requires it to deduct five amounts from the resident's total income, in this order: (1) a personal needs allowance for clothing and other personal needs while in the institution; (2) for a resident with only a spouse at home, an additional amount for that spouse's maintenance needs; (3) for a resident with a family at home, an additional amount for the family's maintenance needs; (4) incurred expenses for medical or remedial care that are not subject to payment by a third party; and (5) the full amount of any SSI and state supplementary payments the resident continues to receive. All five are amounts the agency must deduct, not benefits a family applies for, and the amount for a spouse at home comes off before anything reaches the facility. A separate federal statute also caps the pension itself: for a veteran with neither spouse nor child whose nursing facility care is covered by Medicaid, no more than $90 a month in pension is paid for any period after the month of admission, and the same rule applies to a surviving spouse with no child. Whether that cap reaches a stay in a Minnesota State Veterans Home depends on whether the VA pays that home a per diem for its nursing care, so check that with an accredited Veterans Service Officer. The share-of-cost calculation above is for a nursing facility resident. The federal rule applies to people in medical institutions, not to home care delivered under a home and community-based services waiver, and how Minnesota counts Aid and Attendance for someone on a waiver at home is a question to put to the county Medical Assistance eligibility worker or Minnesota's Department of Human Services before you budget from these numbers.6

Because this is a state-specific treatment, Minnesota applicants should confirm how their specific VA pension and Aid and Attendance payments are counted with their County Veterans Service Officer and county Medical Assistance eligibility worker.6

How to Apply and Get Free Help

Apply using VA Form 21-2680 (Examination for Housebound Status or Permanent Need for Regular Aid and Attendance), whose examination information section a medical examiner fills out to document the care need.3 That form covers Aid and Attendance that will be added to either monthly compensation or pension benefits.3 The steps here are the pension route, the one this guide is about: the VA's condition is that you may be eligible for this benefit if you get a VA pension. On that route, a wartime veteran who is not already receiving a VA pension also files VA Form 21P-527EZ (Application for Veterans Pension), which is the means-tested wartime pension application. A veteran who receives VA disability compensation rather than a pension does not file it; the 21-2680 covers Aid and Attendance added to that compensation.3 You can apply online at VA.gov, by mail to the VA Pension Intake Center, or in person at a VA regional office, and an accredited attorney, accredited claims agent, or accredited Veterans Service Organization representative can help you file. On how long a decision takes, the VA's own answer is "It depends." It works claims in the order it receives them, unless a claim requires priority processing.3

Do not do this alone. Minnesota law requires a county board, alone or jointly with other county boards, to appoint a County Veterans Service Officer, whose duty is to help residents secure the benefits provided by law for military service.7 You can also reach LinkVet, the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs one-stop service center for veterans and their families, at 1-888-546-5838.7 Minnesota Statutes section 197.604 makes it unlawful for a County Veterans Service Officer to receive any fee, directly or indirectly, for that help, and a violation is a gross misdemeanor.7

If the VA denies the claim or grants less than expected, the decision is not final. After an initial decision, the veteran has three decision review options: a Supplemental Claim filing new and relevant evidence the VA did not have when it reviewed the case before, a Higher-Level Review in which a higher-level reviewer looks at the case with no new evidence submitted, or a Board Appeal to the Board of Veterans' Appeals for review by a Veterans Law Judge. Only one of them can be elected. These are an election, not a menu that can be worked in parallel: under 38 CFR 3.2500(b), a claimant who has filed under one of these options may not file under a different one on the same claim or issue while that review is pending final adjudication, and none of them is open while the benefit is on appeal before a federal court. So pick the route that fits the reason for the denial rather than filing two to hedge.8 For most VA benefits, a Higher-Level Review or Board Appeal must be elected within one year of the date the VA issued notice of its decision; certain types of VA benefits have shorter time limits, and your decision letter tells you which deadline applies. A Supplemental Claim can be filed at any time after that notice, but the timing still costs you: a Supplemental Claim the VA receives more than one year after the date on the decision notice takes an effective date no earlier than the date the VA receives it, and continuous pursuit of the claim is broken unless the VA grants an extension of the one-year period for good cause. Filing after the one-year mark can therefore cost back pay reaching to the original claim date, so file inside the year even though the door stays open.8 Your County Veterans Service Officer can help file the review at no cost.7 If the denial turned on thin medical evidence, a Supplemental Claim is the option built for new and relevant evidence, such as a more complete VA Form 21-2680 exam.8,3

Compare Care Settings in Minnesota

Aid and Attendance can help pay for any care setting. See how it works for the others:

• How Aid and Attendance Pays for Assisted Living in Minnesota
• How Aid and Attendance Pays for a Nursing Home in Minnesota
• How Aid and Attendance Pays for Memory Care in Minnesota

Learn More

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.