Ohio Medicaid & the PASSPORT Waiver: How It Works for Senior Care

Ohio's largest Medicaid home-and-community-based waiver for older adults, explained — what it covers, who it's for, and reported 2026 eligibility guidelines to verify with your county office.

Ohio expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act effective January 1, 2014 — we should note this date has strong secondary corroboration, but we did not locate a direct primary-source citation to confirm it with full certainty, so we present it as the effective date reported consistently elsewhere rather than something we independently verified against a primary state document.

What PASSPORT is

PASSPORT — short for Pre-Admission Screening System Providing Options and Resources Today — is Ohio's largest Medicaid home- and community-based services waiver for older adults. It's designed to help Medicaid-eligible seniors who need a nursing-home level of care remain at home or in a community setting instead of moving into a nursing facility. It's jointly administered by the Ohio Department of Aging (aging.ohio.gov), which runs the program day to day, and the Ohio Department of Medicaid, which oversees the broader Medicaid program PASSPORT operates under.

What PASSPORT covers

For seniors who qualify, PASSPORT can cover a range of services, including:

• Personal care (help with bathing, dressing, and similar daily activities)
• Homemaker and chore services
• Home-delivered meals
• Adult day care
• Minor home modifications (things like grab bars or ramps)
• Emergency response systems
• Medical equipment
• Social work counseling
• Medical transportation
• Waiver nursing
• Respite care for family caregivers
• Structured Family Caregiving, added to the program in October 2024

That last addition, Structured Family Caregiving, is worth calling out specifically since it's relatively new: it allows a family caregiver living with the Medicaid recipient to receive support and a daily payment for providing care, rather than the model where all covered services come from outside agencies.

Reported 2026 eligibility guidelines — verify before relying on these

Eligibility for PASSPORT depends on both a medical/functional assessment (broadly, needing a nursing-home level of care) and financial limits. We found the following 2026 figures reported by a secondary source, not a primary state document we could independently confirm as current, so treat these as a starting point for the conversation rather than a final answer:

• Monthly income limit: approximately $2,982
• Countable asset limit: $2,000 for a single applicant, $3,000 for a married couple
• Home equity limit: approximately $752,000

Medicaid financial rules are detailed, change periodically, and have exceptions — spousal impoverishment protections, for example — that a general explainer like this one can't fully capture. Before making any decision based on these numbers, verify current figures directly with your county Job and Family Services office — for Franklin County families, that's the same office that also handles the application process (see our Ombudsman & APS page for Franklin County contact information for related aging services).

How this fits with the rest of your payment plan

PASSPORT is one piece of how Columbus-area families cover the cost of care — most families combine it with private pay, and some with long-term care insurance or VA benefits. For the full picture of payment options, see Paying for Care in Ohio, and for what care actually costs in Ohio before any of these payment sources are applied, see our cost overview.