Long-term care insurance is one of the few premiums Congress deliberately made deductible. It is also one of the few with a hard dollar ceiling that has nothing to do with what you actually paid.
Everything below was verified against the IRS revenue procedures and the statute on September 6, 2026. Two tax years matter right now: 2025, if you are amending, and 2026, if you are planning for the return you will file in 2027. Every figure is labeled.
Only a “Qualified” Contract Counts
The deduction runs through IRC 7702B, which treats a qualified long-term care insurance contract as an accident and health insurance contract, so its premiums become medical care under section 213(d).
Section 7702B(b) sets the bar. The contract must provide only coverage of qualified long-term care services, be guaranteed renewable, contain no cash surrender value, and satisfy the consumer protection requirements in 7702B(g). Policies sold since 1997 are almost always written to be tax-qualified, and the carrier will tell you so on the declarations page. If yours is not, stop here: the premium is simply not a medical expense.
The Age-Banded Cap
This is the number people come for. The limit is set annually under section 213(d)(10) and keyed to your attained age before the close of the tax year, per person. A married couple each gets their own band.
| Attained age before the close of the tax year | Tax year 2026 limit | Tax year 2025 limit |
|---|---|---|
| 40 or less | $500 | $480 |
| More than 40, not more than 50 | $930 | $900 |
| More than 50, not more than 60 | $1,860 | $1,800 |
| More than 60, not more than 70 | $4,960 | $4,810 |
| More than 70 | $6,200 | $6,020 |
The 2026 column is section 4.27 of Revenue Procedure 2025-32, read directly off the IRS PDF. The 2025 column is section 2.28 of Revenue Procedure 2024-40, and the same five figures appear in Publication 502 for 2025 and in the 2025 Instructions for Schedule A, which is a useful cross-check because third-party sites routinely publish last year’s table.
As of September 6, 2026 the IRS had not published the 2027 figures. That revenue procedure normally lands in October, so do not plan a 2027 premium around a number you find online today.
If you pay more than the cap, the excess is not deductible anywhere. A 68-year-old paying $6,500 a year in 2026 gets $4,960 of it into the medical expense column and eats the remaining $1,540.
On Schedule A, the Floor Usually Eats It
The capped amount is a medical expense, not a standalone deduction. The 2025 Instructions for Schedule A say you can deduct only the part of your medical and dental expenses that exceeds 7.5% of your adjusted gross income.
Run it. A 65-year-old couple with $90,000 of AGI pays $5,500 between them in 2026 premiums. Both are in the 61 to 70 band, so both caps are $4,960 and the full $5,500 is includible. Their 7.5% floor is $6,750. Unless they have another $1,250 of medical spending, the premium produces a deduction of zero. Then they still have to beat the standard deduction to itemize at all.
The Schedule A instructions add one more subtraction: reduce your insurance premiums by any self-employed health insurance deduction claimed on Schedule 1, line 17, and do not include premiums paid by a pretax reduction to your compensation. The general mechanics of this section are in the medical expense tax deduction guide.
The Self-Employed Route Is the One That Pays
If you have self-employment income, take it here instead. IRC 162(l) lets a self-employed individual deduct amounts paid for medical insurance for themselves, a spouse, dependents and children under 27, and 162(l)(2)(C) specifically brings in qualified long-term care insurance, capped at eligible long-term care premiums as defined in section 213(d)(10).
Same age table. Completely different result. This deduction is above the line, so there is no 7.5% floor, no itemizing, and it works even if you take the standard deduction. That 65-year-old couple with a $5,500 premium and no other medical spending goes from a $0 Schedule A deduction to $5,500 off adjusted gross income.
Two limits to know. Section 162(l)(2)(B) blocks the deduction for any month you or your spouse were eligible to participate in a subsidized employer health plan, and it applies that test separately to long-term care coverage, so employer medical coverage does not automatically kill the long-term care piece. And 162(l)(4) says the deduction is not taken into account in figuring net earnings from self-employment, so it cuts income tax but not self-employment tax. The full walkthrough is in the self-employed health insurance deduction, and the wider question of when premiums are deductible at all is in is health insurance tax deductible.
HSA Dollars Pay the Premium, Up to the Same Caps
Health savings accounts refuse to pay most insurance premiums. Long-term care insurance is one of the listed exceptions.
Publication 969 for 2025 lists long-term care insurance among the premiums an HSA distribution can cover, and says the premiums you can treat as qualified medical expenses are subject to limits based on age that are adjusted annually, pointing to the Schedule A instructions for the dollar figures. Those are the same 213(d)(10) caps: $6,200 at the top band for 2026.
That is money that went in untaxed and comes out untaxed, with no floor and no itemizing, which makes it the cheapest way to pay a long-term care premium if you have an HSA balance. Contribution room for 2026 is $4,400 self-only and $8,750 family, covered in HSA contribution limits, and the reporting happens on Form 8889.
One trap: employer contributions to cover qualified long-term care services through a flexible spending or similar arrangement must be included in your income and reported as W-2 wages, per Publication 502. A health FSA is not a route here.
Hybrid Life-Plus-Long-Term-Care Policies
Hybrid and asset-based policies, the ones that pay a death benefit if you never need care, are the fastest-growing corner of this market and the worst-treated by the tax code.
IRC 7702B(e)(2) is explicit: no deduction is allowed under section 213(a) for any payment made for coverage under a qualified long-term care insurance contract if the payment is made as a charge against the cash surrender value of a life insurance contract or the cash value of an annuity contract. That is precisely how these products fund the long-term care rider.
Publication 502 backs it from the other side. It says you cannot include premiums for life insurance policies, and that when a policy provides payments for other than medical care you can include only the medical portion if the charge for it is reasonable and separately stated in the contract or given to you in a separate statement. So the practical test is whether the carrier separately states a long-term care charge that is not being taken from cash value. Usually it does not. Assume a hybrid premium is nondeductible unless your carrier documents otherwise.
The Benefits You Receive
Because a qualified contract is treated as accident and health insurance, the benefits are generally excluded from income as reimbursement for medical care.
The cap bites only on per diem or indemnity contracts that pay a flat daily amount regardless of what care actually cost. Under 7702B(d), the per diem limitation is the greater of the stated dollar amount or the costs incurred for qualified long-term care services, reduced by reimbursements received from other sources. For calendar year 2026 that stated amount is $430 a day (Revenue Procedure 2025-32, section 4.62). For calendar year 2025 it was $420, and Publication 502 gives the annual equivalent as $153,300 for 2025.
Read that structure carefully, because it is more generous than the headline suggests. If your actual cost of care runs $500 a day, the limitation is $500, not $430, and nothing is taxable. The $430 only matters when a policy pays you more per day than care is costing. Anything above the limitation goes into gross income. Benefits are reported to you on Form 1099-LTC and reconciled on Form 8853. For what the underlying care actually costs, see nursing home cost and memory care cost.
State Credits and Deductions
Roughly a dozen states add their own incentive, and they are small, structurally inconsistent, and change often. Two live examples show the spread.
New York offers a nonrefundable credit worth 20% of qualifying long-term care premiums paid during the tax year, capped at $1,500 for individual taxpayers, available only if New York adjusted gross income is under $250,000, claimed on Form IT-249. Minnesota offers a credit of 25% of premiums, but capped at $100 per beneficiary ($200 for a married couple on one combined policy), and the policy must have a lifetime benefit limit of $100,000 or more, claimed on Schedule M1LTI.
Same idea, a 15x difference in ceiling. Other states run deductions rather than credits, some tie eligibility to partnership-qualified policies, and a few have let their incentives lapse. Check your own state revenue department’s current-year form instructions rather than a national summary, because these are the figures third-party sites get wrong most often.
The Bottom Line
For tax year 2026 the ceiling is $500 to $6,200 per person by age, and for 2025 it was $480 to $6,020. The policy has to be tax-qualified under 7702B, and hybrid life-plus-care premiums funded from cash value are out.
Where you claim it matters more than the cap. On Schedule A the 7.5% floor swallows a typical premium whole. Above the line under 162(l), a self-employed filer keeps the entire capped amount. And HSA dollars pay the premium with money that was never taxed in the first place.
The same floor logic governs every other medical write-off, including dental expenses. This page explains the rules, not your return; work from the IRS instructions for your tax year or use a preparer for your own numbers.