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It’s good news, in a way, that now that we’re in 2026, millions more people with disabilities are eligible in the United States to open ABLE accounts. This expanded eligibility allows more disabled individuals to build financial assets without risking their access to essential public programs that they can’t live without.
The requirement to stay below strict asset limits in order to maintain eligibility for support programs has placed people with disabilities in a difficult and unfair position. Many depend on programs like Social Security for survival, but are forced to remain poor to qualify. Efforts to work or accept nonfinancial support from friends or family can become risks that threaten their basic security.
In this regard, ABLE accounts offer some protection, somewhat. Created by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2014, the ABLE Act is one of those cute acronyms that lawmakers like to attach to their legislation to make it less of a mouthful. It stands for “Achieving a Better Life Experience.”
At the time of its signing, the law allowed states to create tax-free savings accounts for people who became disabled before age twenty-six. Initially, individuals could deposit up to $14,000 per year and $100,000 over a lifetime, with these funds excluded from asset calculations for public support programs. ABLE funds can be used for a wide range of disability-related expenses, the definition of which is vague and not necessarily limited to things that are medically necessary.
By contrast, if an individual receiving Medicaid has more than $2,000 in their bank account, they can be kicked off the program.
Actually, the law’s full name is the Stephen Beck Jr. Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act, named after an advocate from Burke, Virginia. Beck’s experience raising a daughter with Down syndrome gave him a firsthand understanding of the hardships families face navigating complex and often unfair eligibility rules for essential disability support programs.
So Beck teamed up with other parents and advocates and championed an effort to change the law. After years of lobbying in Washington, D.C., the ABLE Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives on December 3, 2014. Beck died unexpectedly a few days later—without witnessing the Senate pass the bill, and the President signing it later that month.
The first ABLE program launched in Ohio in 2016. As of September 2025, more than 223,000 ABLE accounts held nearly $3 billion in assets, with programs now available in forty-six states and the District of Columbia.
But the ABLE Age Adjustment Act, which Congress passed in December 2022 and took effect January 1, 2026, raised the threshold for the onset of disability from twenty-six to forty-six. That means people who became disabled on or before their forty-sixth birthday are now eligible to open an ABLE account. As a result, the estimated number of individuals eligible for ABLE accounts is projected to increase from eight million to fourteen million.
People with disabilities can also save more money in their ABLE accounts because the annual contribution limit was increased from $19,000 to $20,000. That happened because the Internal Revenue Service raised the federal gift tax limit, which also serves as the cap on annual deposits for ABLE accounts.
Yet, despite these improvements, millions of people with disabilities remain excluded from ABLE account eligibility or still face significant barriers.
According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) provides monthly payments of up to $994 for individuals with limited income and resources. SSI is intended to provide some monthly financial support to those who would otherwise qualify to collect Social Security payments due to age or disability but haven’t worked enough (or at all) to have paid the required Social Security payroll taxes needed to fully qualify. I’ve known a whole lot of disabled people for whom SSI was their primary source of income.
But if they want to get married to someone else who receives SSI, they face a stiff marriage penalty from which having an ABLE account cannot save them. The SSA says that the maximum monthly amount a married couple can receive is $1,491. So if two people who were receiving the SSI monthly maximum wanted to get married and expected to be able to combine their paltry incomes to get $1,988 a month, their marriage would cost them nearly $500 a month.
That is a lot of money to forgo. And everyone who receives SSI can be docked pay if they accept in-kind support for things like rent. The SSA calls this in-kind support and maintenance (ISM) and even maintains a set of ISM rules with a staff to enforce them.
Suppose that someone receiving SSI lives with two roommates and pays less than one-third of the rent so they can afford to live there. The SSA can deduct the difference from their monthly stipend.
Until recently, food was considered ISM—meaning if an SSI recipient received food paid for by someone else, they had to report it and potentially face a benefit reduction. But the SSA changed its rules in 2024 so that food is no longer counted as ISM. But even after those changes, deductions for other types of in-kind support remain, and SSI recipients must still play what amounts to an impoverishment game. Having an ABLE account won’t save them from this, either.
As oppressive as these rules are, Congress seems to like them that way. Legislation that would have made life easier for SSI recipients, including the elimination of silly restrictions on in-kind support and the marriage penalty, has been introduced in every session of Congress since 2013. But none of it has become law, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were the majority party.
And what about disabled people who still aren’t eligible to open an ABLE account, such as those who become disabled after their forty-sixth birthday, as often happens to folks in their later years? What about people who have reached the limits of an ABLE account? It may seem like a lot to have $100,000 saved, but that’s hardly enough for a financially comfortable retirement.
To reiterate, ABLE accounts offer some protection, somewhat. But many disabled people are still forced to play that impoverishment game. The only way to truly end this injustice would be to ask a simple question when determining if a person qualifies for public support: Do you have a pulse? If the answer to that question is “Yes,” then they should qualify.
But those who make public policies tend to design them as if people with disabilities must be more than just living human beings to be eligible to derive benefit from these policies. This is what creates the extra bureaucratic hoops that people must jump through.
Laws like the ABLE Act acknowledge the injustices created by outdated disability policies. They recognize the fact that being disabled is expensive. Disabled people can’t live without a lot of costly goods and services, like wheelchairs and ventilators and paying people to assist us in our homes. Essential things like our homes, vehicles, and even our clothes often must be custom-designed or modified, which costs money. We often have more expensive medical needs, too. All of this places us at an automatic economic disadvantage.
The ABLE Act helps reduce some of the harm these policies cause, but it does not address the underlying causes. As a result, many disabled people continue to struggle to survive, and some remain as vulnerable as ever.