Five short videos on ABLE, in plain language.

Meet Maya. She has a disability that began before her forty-sixth birthday. Under the old federal rule, if she saved more than two thousand dollars in a bank account, she would lose her SSI benefits. And usually her Medicaid coverage right along with them. So she couldn't save. Not for an emergency. Not for a car. Not for a security deposit. Every goal in her life was capped at two thousand dollars. In December of twenty fourteen, Congress passed the ABLE Act. It created a new kind of savings account called a 529A. Maya can now contribute up to nineteen thousand dollars per year. And here is the key. Balances up to one hundred thousand dollars do not count toward the SSI asset limit. For Medicaid, the entire balance is excluded. No cap at all. Maya can finally build an emergency fund. Save for a car. Cover a security deposit. And keep every benefit she qualifies for. That is the ABLE Act.

For a single person on SSI, the federal asset limit is two thousand dollars. It has not been raised since nineteen eighty-nine. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that limit is worth less than five hundred dollars today. What counts as a countable asset? Bank accounts, stocks, most cash savings. What does not count? Your home. One car. A burial plot. But cross that two thousand dollar line by even a single dollar, and you lose SSI. You lose Medicaid. Every benefit tied to means testing disappears. So families spend down every month. They gift money to relatives. They hide cash. They stay poor by design. The ABLE Act changed the math. Balances in an ABLE account up to one hundred thousand dollars are invisible to the SSI asset test. For Medicaid, the entire balance is excluded, no matter how large. In a 2026 study, researcher Michelle Yin found that eligible households saw disposable income rise by one and a half to three and a third percent, and wage income rise by seven point seven percent. The first causal evidence that removing the asset cliff changes real lives.

The original ABLE Act had a strict rule. To open an ABLE account, your disability had to have begun before your twenty-sixth birthday. That rule excluded millions of adults. Multiple sclerosis diagnosed at thirty-four. Parkinson's at forty-five. Combat injury at twenty-eight. Traumatic brain injury at thirty. None of those individuals qualified. In December of 2022, Congress passed the ABLE Age Adjustment Act. It raised the onset age cap from twenty-six to forty-six. The new rule took effect on January first, 2026. Approximately six million additional adults are now eligible. That is a doubling of the eligible population. Michelle Yin's 2026 analysis projects one point nine billion dollars in additional disposable income per year, once the age expansion fully phases in. If your disability began before you turned forty-six, you are likely eligible. Check with our eligibility explorer to confirm.

ABLE money can pay for any Qualified Disability Expense, or QDE. The federal definition is deliberately broad. A QDE is any expense that maintains or improves the beneficiary's health, independence, or quality of life. Housing is covered. Rent. Mortgage. Utilities. Property taxes. Home modifications. Transportation is covered. Car payments. Insurance. Public transit. Uber, Lyft, taxi. Adapted vehicle equipment. Fuel. Health expenses that Medicaid or private insurance does not cover. Dental. Vision. Therapy. Supplements. Copays. Deductibles. Education, employment support, and assistive technology are all QDEs. Tuition. Job training. Screen readers. Communication devices. Personal care attendants. The gray areas are gym memberships, recreation, and some vacation expenses. When in doubt, ask the plan administrator. And always keep the receipt. Our QDE Classifier tool has over one hundred common expenses tagged with plain language guidance.

One in four working-age adults in the United States has a disability. Yet fewer than one in fifty employers offer any ABLE benefit today. Here is how an employer match works. It is structurally identical to a 401k match. The employee contributes to their ABLE account. The employer matches, up to a cap you set. Employer contributions are treated as ordinary compensation. Fully deductible as a payroll expense. Early evidence on ABLE-offering employers shows a retention lift of two to five percentage points over comparable firms. Consider a five hundred employee firm. A five hundred dollar match with fifteen percent employee take-up. Total match cost is about thirty-seven thousand dollars per year. Retention savings, based on typical replacement costs, come to about fifty-five thousand dollars per year. Payback lands inside eighteen months. How do you start? Pick a state plan. Usually your headquartered state. Set the match cap. Announce the benefit during open enrollment. Track adoption. Most firms are live in a single quarter. Model your own numbers using our Employer ROI Calculator.