By Minneapolis Senior Advisor Care Team · August 10, 2026
A practical, step-by-step walkthrough of applying for Minnesota's Elderly Waiver as a Hennepin County resident, from the first phone call through the MnCHOICES assessment to what the waiver actually pays for once approved.
Where most Hennepin County families actually start
Most families do not start this process by researching Medicaid waivers. They start because a parent in Minneapolis, Bloomington, or Minnetonka has had a fall, a hospital stay, or a slow decline that has made living alone unsafe, and someone finally asks the question out loud: is there any help paying for this? In Hennepin County, the answer usually runs through Minnesota's Elderly Waiver (EW), the state's home and community-based Medicaid waiver for seniors who need a nursing-facility level of care but want to receive services at home, in adult foster care, or inside a licensed assisted living community.
This walkthrough covers the actual sequence: who to call first, what the assessment involves, how financial eligibility is tested, and what happens once a Hennepin County resident is approved. It is not a substitute for a conversation with Hennepin County Human Services or the Senior LinkAge Line, but it should make that first call less confusing.
What the Elderly Waiver is, and is not
The Elderly Waiver pays for services: personal care assistance, home health aide visits, homemaker services, case management, adult day services, home-delivered meals, respite care, chore services, transportation, and home or vehicle accessibility modifications. Inside a licensed assisted living community, it pays for care through "customized living" or "24-hour customized living" service packages.
What it does not pay for is room and board. A Hennepin County resident approved for the Elderly Waiver who moves into assisted living in Edina or St. Louis Park will still owe rent for the apartment itself out of income or assets; the waiver covers the care services layered on top of that rent, not the rent. We cover this gap, and the narrow state Housing Support benefit that can sometimes help with it, in more detail on our Medicaid waivers and assisted living page.
Step 1: Call before you assume you know the answer
The fastest starting point for a Hennepin County family is the Senior LinkAge Line at 1-800-333-2433, Minnesota's free statewide information and assistance helpline, operated by Trellis under contract with the Minnesota Board on Aging. You can also contact Hennepin County Human Services directly to request a long-term-care needs assessment. Either route leads to the same next step, and calling first, before assuming your parent will not qualify, is worth doing even if you expect a no.
Step 2: The MnCHOICES assessment
Eligibility for the Elderly Waiver runs through a MnCHOICES assessment, a standardized, in-person evaluation of functional need, generally conducted by a county or managed-care assessor. The assessment looks at activities of daily living, cognitive status, safety in the home, and current support systems, and it determines whether your parent meets the nursing-facility level of care standard the waiver requires. Being present for this assessment, or making sure a family member who sees your parent regularly can speak to it, tends to produce a more accurate picture than the assessment alone.
Bring a written list of specific incidents rather than general impressions; assessors weigh concrete examples, like a missed medication dose on a documented date or a fall with no one present, more heavily than a general sense that "things have gotten harder."
Step 3: The financial side, separately from the functional side
Functional eligibility and financial eligibility are assessed separately, and both must be met. Minnesota is a "209(b) medically needy" state for long-term-care Medical Assistance, meaning there is no hard income ceiling, but income above the Medically Needy Income Limit must be spent down on medical or care costs each budget period. Commonly cited figures for 2026 put that limit around $1,305 per month for an individual, with a countable asset limit around $3,000 for a single applicant, though these specific dollar figures should be confirmed against Hennepin County's current guidance or the DHS Eligibility Policy Manual before you rely on them for planning, since they were sourced from third-party elder-law aggregators rather than a live DHS page during our research.
If your parent is not yet financially eligible for Medical Assistance but needs the same level of help, Minnesota's state-funded Alternative Care program uses a nearly identical service array as a pre-Medicaid bridge. We walk through the difference between the two programs, and which one a given Hennepin County family is more likely to qualify for, in a separate companion piece.
Step 4: Choosing the setting once you are approved
Approval for the Elderly Waiver does not lock your parent into one setting. The same waiver can fund care at home, in adult foster care, or inside a licensed assisted living community through a customized living service package. This is the point where it is worth touring a few Hennepin County communities, such as options in Minneapolis, Richfield, or Golden Valley, and asking each one directly whether it holds a current Medicaid waiver provider agreement and how many current residents actually use it. A community can hold the agreement on paper and still have no waiver capacity available at a given time.
Common missteps Hennepin County families make along the way
The most common mistake is waiting for a discharge planner or a crisis to force the timeline, rather than starting the MnCHOICES assessment while your parent is still stable enough to participate fully in it. A close second is assuming that any Hennepin County assisted living community accepting private-pay residents will also accept the Elderly Waiver once a parent qualifies; not every building holds a current Medicaid waiver provider agreement, and even fewer have open waiver capacity at any given moment, so this is worth confirming before you tour rather than after your parent has moved in.
A third misstep is treating the financial eligibility test as fixed and final. Because Minnesota runs long-term-care Medical Assistance as a medically needy spend-down program rather than a hard income cutoff, a parent who does not qualify today because of income can sometimes qualify in a later month once medical and care costs are counted against that income. An elder law attorney or a Hennepin County financial worker can walk through this month-by-month math in a way that a single eligibility check will not capture.
Step 5: What happens after approval, and what to do while you wait
Once approved, a case manager works with your family to build a service plan, matched to the assessed needs and capped at a cost comparable to the average nursing-facility rate. Hennepin County's human services team, or a managed-care plan for enrollees in Minnesota Senior Health Options, coordinates this locally, while the Elderly Waiver program itself is administered at the state level by the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
The process from first call to approved service plan takes time, and Hennepin County families should not wait for a crisis before starting it. If your parent is managing today but you can see the trajectory, calling the Senior LinkAge Line now, even months before you expect to need the waiver, gets the MnCHOICES assessment on the calendar and gives you a realistic read on both functional and financial eligibility before a hospital discharge or a fall forces the timeline.