On March 27, 2024, SSA published the final rule “omitting food from in-kind support and maintenance calculations”. This is good news for SSI recipients who have had their benefits reduced because they receive food from others. SSA noted, “disabled individuals are more likely to be food insecure, and this policy change will remove critical barriers to receiving informal food assistance from friends, family, and community networks of support”.
This rule provides that SSA will no longer consider food expenses in their in-kind support and maintenance calculations (ISM); instead, SSA will “consider only shelter expenses (i.e., room, rent, mortgage payments, real property taxes, heating fuel, gas, electricity, water, sewerage, and garbage collection services).”
SSA clarified that “though we are omitting food expenses from our ISM calculations, we will still ask a question about food for the narrow purpose of determining whether to use the Value of the One-Third Reduction (VTR) rule or the Presumed Maximum Value (PMV) rule”. When an SSI applicant lives in another person’s household, the SSA will ask if that person provides for all their food. If the answer is no, SSA will value the shelter using the PMV rule.