Protect Your Assets From Nursing Home Spend-Down — Five Years Before You Need To

A Medicaid asset protection trust (MAPT) is an irrevocable trust designed to remove assets from your countable estate for Georgia Medicaid long-term care eligibility purposes. You transfer assets into the trust, give up control of the principal, and name a trustee to manage them. You may retain the income the trust assets generate. The beneficiaries you name receive the assets at your death. Once five years have passed from the date you funded the trust, those assets are no longer counted toward the Medicaid asset limit. This is the primary legal tool for protecting savings, investment accounts, and real estate from nursing home spend-down in Georgia.

Georgia Medicaid examines every financial transfer you made in the 60 months before your application. If you transferred assets into a MAPT within that window, Medicaid calculates a penalty period — a number of months during which Medicaid will not pay for care, calculated by dividing the transfer amount by the average monthly nursing home cost in Georgia (approximately $8,100 in 2025). The lookback does not prevent you from qualifying eventually — it delays when benefits begin. Assets transferred more than five years before application are fully protected. Funding the trust as early as possible is the most important timing decision in Medicaid planning.

Yes. A MAPT is commonly used to protect the family home while you continue living in it. The trust can include a retained life estate — a legal provision allowing you to continue using and occupying the property as your primary residence for the rest of your life. The property is transferred into the trust name, so Medicaid cannot count it after the lookback period. It also removes the home from your probate estate, so it passes directly to beneficiaries at your death without going through court. Medicaid estate recovery, which allows the state to seek reimbursement from a deceased recipient’s probate estate, generally does not reach assets held in an irrevocable trust.

When you die, the assets in the MAPT pass to the beneficiaries you named in the trust — typically your children or other heirs. The distribution does not go through probate. The trustee distributes the assets according to the trust terms. Because the assets were in an irrevocable trust rather than your personal estate, they are generally not subject to Georgia Medicaid estate recovery. The state’s estate recovery program targets probate assets — assets held in a MAPT at the time of death are outside that reach. This is one of the key benefits of the MAPT structure beyond spend-down protection during your lifetime.

A MAPT is a type of irrevocable trust, but it is drafted specifically for Medicaid planning and includes provisions a general irrevocable trust may not have. A general irrevocable trust might be used for estate tax planning or creditor protection — each with different structural requirements. A MAPT is specifically designed to satisfy Medicaid’s lookback rules, preserve your ability to receive income from trust assets, and protect the home through a retained life estate. If Medicaid planning is your goal, the trust document needs to be drafted with that purpose in mind — a general irrevocable trust may not satisfy Medicaid’s specific eligibility rules.