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About Benefits Calculator
An independent, free website that works out which US benefits a household can likely get, and the exact pay where each one ends, from the programs' own published rules.
Benefits Calculator answers two questions most people can only guess at: which public benefits your household can likely get, and what happens to them if you earn more. Tell it where you live, who lives with you and what comes in each month, and it works out SNAP, Medicaid and CHIP, the marketplace health insurance tax credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, WIC, school meals, TANF, child care help, SSI, housing vouchers, energy help and Lifeline for your state, with the rule behind each answer.
Then it does the part no application form does: it works your household out again at every level of pay, so you can see the “cliffs”, the points where one more dollar of pay ends a benefit worth far more than that dollar, and what a raise really leaves you after taxes and lost help.
How the answers are made
Each program is worked out with its published rules: the federal regulations (for SNAP, 7 CFR part 273), the tax law and the IRS’s yearly figures, HHS’s poverty guidelines, and each state’s own limits and choices. Every figure the calculator uses is in the site’s data files with the government page it comes from and the day we checked it, and the pages print their figures from those same files, so a table and the calculator can never disagree. More on how the calculator works, and every source is listed on Sources.
Independent
This is not a government website. It is not run by, endorsed by or connected with any federal, state or local agency. We take no applications and pass nothing on to any office. Applying for these programs is free: no one may charge you to apply, and every program’s own office will help you for nothing.
Who we are
Benefits Calculator is published by PVV Media Technologies, 102 N 2nd Avenue E, Newton, IA 50208, United States. It is free to use and carries no advertising. No bank, insurer, lender, law firm or other company pays us or chooses what we publish.
What we ask you to remember
The answers are estimates from the published rules and what you type. Only the agency that runs a program can decide whether you qualify and how much you get: they count income in ways a short form cannot (for example over different months), check things we don’t ask, and some programs have waiting lists or run out of money in the year. Use the answers to see what to apply for, and what a change in pay would do, then apply. Nothing on the site is legal, tax or financial advice.
Questions, or something that looks wrong? Write to contact@benefitscalculator.app, or see Corrections.