Can a Nursing Home Take Your House in Florida?

Can a nursing home or Medicaid take your parents house in Florida? The house is safe while they live there, but section 409.9101 can claim it after death.

Transcript

A call came into the office this week from a man whose father had just been moved into a nursing home. The father owns his house outright, has for thirty years, and the son had read enough overnight to be scared that Florida was about to take it. That fear is the single most common one I hear from families dealing with long-term care, and it is almost entirely wrong.

Here is what this episode settles. Can Medicaid or a nursing home actually take the house while your parent is alive, what really happens to it after death, and the one document that closes the gap between those two answers. Those three questions cover almost everyone who calls me worried about this.

Start with the part that is good news, because it is true and most people do not believe it until I say it twice. A nursing home is paid for the care it provides. It has no claim on anybody’s house, ever. The fear people actually have is about Medicaid, the program that pays for most long-term nursing care once someone runs through their own money. Medicaid treats a homestead as an exempt asset while the owner lives there or intends to return to it. In Florida in 2026 that exemption covers home equity up to $752,000 for a single applicant, and there is no limit at all when a spouse, a child under 21, or a blind or permanently disabled child is living in the home. A person can qualify for nursing-home Medicaid and keep the house. Nobody sells it to pay for care while the parent is alive.

The risk starts after death, and it has a name. Estate recovery. Federal law requires every state to try to recover what Medicaid spent on a recipient’s long-term care, once that recipient was 55 or older when the benefits were paid. Florida’s version of this is section 409.9101 of the Florida Statutes, and the mechanism matters more than people realize. The statute recovers by filing a claim in the probate proceeding. Not a lien recorded during the parent’s lifetime. Not a claim against the child directly. A claim filed in probate, after death, against the probate estate. That single design choice is why some families lose the house to this and others do not.

If the house passes through probate, the claim can reach it. If the house passes to the children outside of probate, there is nothing for the claim to attach to. The statute itself backs this up. It also will not enforce the debt at all if the parent is survived by a spouse, by a child under 21, or by a blind or disabled child, and it cannot enforce it against property that is exempt from creditors under Florida’s constitution while it stays in that exempt status. The whole outcome turns on structure, not on how much the state spent.

So the fix is not complicated, and it is not new. The fix is keeping the house out of probate in the first place. For a married couple who own the home together as tenants by the entireties, the house already passes to the surviving spouse at the first death with no probate at all, and Florida bars estate recovery while that surviving spouse is alive. That protects most married couples automatically. The gap is the single owner, the widow or widower, or the second home that is not titled that way, and for those, Florida uses a document called a lady bird deed, also called an enhanced life estate deed. It names who gets the house, it lets the parent keep full control and the right to sell or change their mind for as long as they live, and at death the house passes directly to the people named, outside of probate, which means outside the reach of section 409.9101.

I want to flag the mistake families make trying to solve this themselves, because it is expensive and it is the wrong direction. Someone hears “keep it out of probate” and deeds the house to the kids outright, right now, while the parent is still alive. That is a gift, and a gift of the house is a transfer that starts Medicaid’s five-year look-back penalty, the same sixty-month window Florida reviews before approving a nursing-home application. A parent who gives away the house and then needs care within five years can end up ineligible for Medicaid at the exact moment they need it, with no house and no way to pay for care either. The gift also costs the children the step-up in basis they would otherwise get, which can mean a real capital-gains tax bill when they eventually sell a house that appreciated over decades. And once it is in the children’s names, it is exposed to the children’s own creditors and divorces while the parent is still alive to need it. A lady bird deed gets to the same result, keeping the house for the family, without starting the penalty clock and without giving up ownership today.

One more piece, because it comes up in the same breath every time. A second home, a vacation property, or a rental does not get any of the homestead protection described above. It counts as an asset for Medicaid eligibility, and it is fully exposed to estate recovery if it runs through probate. Renting it at a fair price turns it into income-producing property, which Florida disregards for eligibility purposes even if it is only rented seasonally, though the rent itself counts as income. A lady bird deed still works to keep it out of probate. That property needs its own plan, separate from the homestead.

Here is what to do this week if this is sitting on you the way it was sitting on the man who called. Find out how the house is titled right now. If it is a married couple holding it as tenants by the entireties, the first-death problem is already solved and the conversation moves to the second death. If it is one name, or two names that are not spouses, that is the gap a lady bird deed closes, and it can usually be signed even after a parent has already gone into care, because it is not a gift and does not trigger the transfer penalty. What it costs to fix is a fraction of what a probate fight or a lost Medicaid application costs. I do this work at the firm, deed included, and the conversation about which document your family actually needs takes thirty minutes.

Read the full guide at stepuplaw.com/can-a-nursing-home-take-your-house-in-florida

Related reading and listening at StepUpLaw

• Florida Medicaid Estate Recovery, and What Is Exempt
• Florida Enhanced Life Estate Deed (Lady Bird Deed) 2026
• How to Protect Assets From a Nursing Home in Florida
• Episode 5, Lady Bird Deeds, the Medicaid Look Back, and Estate Recovery
• Episode 4, Lady Bird Deed or Living Trust for a Florida Home
• Episode 1, What a Florida Lady Bird Deed Actually Does

Related guides

• Florida Medicaid Estate Recovery, and What Is Exempt
• Florida Enhanced Life Estate Deed (Lady Bird Deed) 2026
• How to Protect Assets From a Nursing Home in Florida

Stepping Up is hosted by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. Episodes are general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and listening does not create an attorney-client relationship.