If you have been searching for CDPAP in Texas and getting nowhere, there is nothing wrong with your searching. CDPAP is a New York State program. It does not exist here, and no amount of persistence will make it appear.

I want to say that plainly and early, because I have watched families lose weeks to this. The program is discussed constantly in national caregiver forums, in videos, in advice from a cousin who did it upstate, and none of that discussion mentions that it stops at the state line. So people conclude they must be doing something wrong, or that Texas simply does not pay family caregivers. Neither is true.

Texas has its own route. It is called Consumer Directed Services, and under it your parent can hire and pay a family member as their attendant. This page is what it actually pays, who can and cannot be hired, how long the setup takes, and the conditions that have to be in place first. You have not missed anything. You were handed the wrong name.

Estimated reading time: 14 min read

Overview

CDPAP is a New York Medicaid program and is not available in Texas. The Texas equivalent is Consumer Directed Services, an option available within programs including the STAR+PLUS Home and Community Based Services waiver, under which the person receiving care becomes the employer and can hire a family member as their paid attendant. Spouses are excluded in both states, as are parents of minor children in the equivalent child programs. The $10.60 attendant base wage floor families still read about was discontinued on September 1, 2025; Texas now builds its payment rates around an assumed personal attendant wage of currently $13.00 an hour, set by Rider 23 of the 2026-27 state budget, with authorized hours coming from a functional assessment. The state publishes no standard setup timeline. The care recipient must first qualify for the underlying Medicaid program, which for 2026 means a special income limit of up to $2,982 a month, 300 percent of the Social Security Administration’s 2026 federal benefit rate of $994, and countable assets of up to roughly $2,000. Confirm all figures with Texas HHS.

What this guide covers

• Key insights
• Why everyone keeps telling you about a program you cannot use
• What Consumer Directed Services actually is
• Who cannot be hired, and it catches people
• What it pays, and why the number you found online is gone
• The timeline, and the gap it creates
• What has to be true before any of this applies
• The question nobody asks: who directs the care when your parent cannot?
• What this page is, and where it stops
• Protect Your Family’s Financial Future

Key insights

The short version, before the detail:

• CDPAP is a New York State Medicaid program. It does not operate in Texas, and no Texas agency can enroll anyone in it.
• Texas’s equivalent is Consumer Directed Services, or CDS: an option inside Medicaid programs including the STAR+PLUS waiver, under which the person receiving care becomes the employer of record and can hire an adult child as their paid attendant.
• A spouse cannot be hired as the paid attendant in either state’s program, so the famous one would not have paid the husband either.
• The $10.60 base wage floor still quoted all over the internet was discontinued on September 1, 2025. Texas now uses an assumed personal attendant wage of currently $13.00 an hour inside its rate methodology, which is an input to a formula rather than a promise to any attendant.
• CDS is a way of delivering care that Medicaid has already agreed to fund, so eligibility for the underlying program comes first: for 2026, a special income limit of up to $2,982 a month and countable assets of up to roughly $2,000.

Why everyone keeps telling you about a program you cannot use

CDPAP, the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, is a New York State Medicaid benefit. It is unusually generous, unusually well known, and it dominates online conversation about paying family caregivers in a way that is completely out of proportion to how many people can access it.

So a Texas family searching in good faith reads a dozen articles, watches a video, and comes away believing there is a program they cannot find the door to. What is actually happening is that they are reading about a different state’s benefit. The same mechanism exists under different names in most states, which is why the national version of this question, how to get paid to care for a family member, cannot answer anything until it routes you back to your own state’s program.

Texas does pay family caregivers. It simply calls the mechanism something else, and that naming difference has cost people months of unpaid work they could have been compensated for. That is the entire problem here, and it is solved by knowing one phrase.

What Consumer Directed Services actually is

Under Consumer Directed Services, your parent becomes the employer of record for their own attendant, rather than accepting whoever an agency rosters. A financial management services agency handles the payroll, tax withholding and the compliance paperwork, so nobody is expected to run a payroll from a kitchen table.

The consequential part is who can be hired. In most cases an adult child can be, which means the person already providing the care can be paid for it. That is the difference between a daughter quietly absorbing the cost of her mother’s care in lost income, and that same work being compensated. Now that you have the right name, the question of how payment for care you are already giving actually begins is the one worth reading next: getting paid to care for a parent in Texas.

It is available as an option within several Texas programs, including the STAR+PLUS waiver and the state plan attendant services. Which one applies depends on which program your parent qualifies for, and that is worth establishing before anything else.

Side by side, the two programs are close cousins, which is exactly why the confusion persists:

Who cannot be hired, and it catches people

The exclusion that surprises families most is the spouse. A husband caring for his wife with dementia, full time, for years, generally cannot be paid through this route. Neither can parents of minor children in the equivalent child programs. New York draws the same line in CDPAP, which is worth knowing if the story that started this search was a spouse getting paid somewhere: that is not what CDPAP does either.

I find this one genuinely hard to explain to people, because from where they are standing the spouse is doing the most work of anyone. The rule reflects an assumption baked into the system about what spouses owe each other, and knowing it is the rule does not make it feel fairer.

What it does mean practically is that in a household where a spouse is the primary caregiver, the paid attendant may need to be an adult child or another relative who is also genuinely providing care. That is a real arrangement, not a workaround, and it is worth exploring before concluding the family does not qualify at all.

What it pays, and why the number you found online is gone

Almost every page a family finds on this subject quotes a Texas Medicaid attendant base wage floor of $10.60 an hour. That floor no longer exists. Effective September 1, 2025, Texas discontinued the personal attendant base wage requirement along with the attendant compensation rate enhancement program, and replaced them with an average hourly wage assumed inside the rate methodology: currently $13.00 an hour, set by Rider 23 of the 2026-27 General Appropriations Act (Senate Bill 1, 89th Legislature) and published by HHSC in Information Letter 2025-25.

That distinction is the whole thing, and it is not going to be explained to you at a kitchen table, so here it is. A base wage was a floor: attendants had to be paid at least that much. An assumed wage is an input: the state builds its payment rates around the assumption that an attendant earns $13.00 an hour, and what actually lands in a paycheck is set by the managed care plan’s adopted rate and the arrangement the financial management agency runs within it. HHSC publishes those adopted rates. The families who get a straight answer are usually the ones who asked for the adopted rate that applies to their parent’s specific program and plan, by name, because that is the pot the pay comes out of.

Authorized hours come from the functional assessment rather than from the need you describe on the phone, and they vary widely between families with similar diagnoses. Twenty hours a week and fifty hours a week are both realistic outcomes, and the difference is largely documentation.

Nobody should read any of this and conclude that it replaces a salary, and I would rather say that than let anyone plan around a hope. What it does is convert invisible unpaid labor into paid hours, which for a family that has already lost one income is a materially different situation.

The timeline, and the gap it creates

The honest answer on timing is that Texas does not publish a standard turnaround for CDS setup, so anyone quoting you a fixed number of days is quoting a guess rather than a rule. What the state does describe is the sequence, and the sequence is where the time goes: the Medicaid eligibility determination, the functional assessment that sets the hours, enrollment with a financial management services agency, the employer paperwork in your parent’s name, the attendant’s own hiring and background paperwork, and the service plan.

The part to plan for is that this clock starts after Medicaid eligibility, not alongside it. If your parent is not yet enrolled, the real span is the eligibility determination plus the assessment plus the CDS setup. Where the applicable program is the STAR+PLUS waiver, there is an interest list sitting in front of all of it, and that is the piece least likely to come up unprompted in a first phone call. Texas HHS publishes interest list information and its own interest list reduction reporting, so the size of the wait is a knowable number rather than a rumor.

None of that is a reason not to start. It is a reason to start now rather than when the unpaid caregiving has already become unsustainable, because the process does not speed up in response to how urgently a family needs it to.

What has to be true before any of this applies

Consumer Directed Services is a way of delivering care that Medicaid has already agreed to fund. It is not a separate benefit anyone can apply for on its own, and that is the point families most often miss.

So the first question is whether your parent qualifies for the underlying program at all. For 2026 the special income limit used by the Texas long-term care programs is up to $2,982 a month, which is 300 percent of the Social Security Administration’s 2026 federal benefit rate of $994, alongside countable assets of up to roughly $2,000. The home, a vehicle and several other categories are typically exempt, and that exemption list is the part that goes unsaid while the $2,000 figure does the frightening. A functional or medical determination applies as well, depending on the program.

The families who move through this without losing months are generally the ones who established that first, asked which of the Texas programs their parent is eligible for today rather than only the famous one, and then asked about the CDS option within it. In that order the process is administrative. In the wrong order it is months of effort aimed at a door that was never going to open.

The question nobody asks: who directs the care when your parent cannot?

Consumer Directed Services rests on a word that deserves more attention than it gets in a dementia household: consumer. The model assumes the person receiving care is the one directing it, hiring their attendant, setting the schedule, managing the arrangement. That assumption is doing a lot of quiet work.

For a parent with moderate or advanced dementia it may no longer hold, and families discover this midway through an application when someone asks who is making the employment decisions. The answer matters, because a program built on self-direction has to know whose direction it is following.

There is a mechanism for it. A designated representative can be named to direct the services on your parent’s behalf, and in practice that is frequently the same adult child who is doing everything else. Families who raise it themselves, early, rather than waiting for it to surface as an obstacle, tend to have a straightforward form instead of a stalled application. Where capacity is genuinely in question this starts to touch legal ground, and that is a conversation for an attorney rather than a coach.

What this page is, and where it stops

Everything above describes how these programs are built and what families run into inside them. It is a description, not a determination about your parent, and I am deliberate about that line: eligibility is decided by the state on the record in front of it, and anyone who tells you in advance what the answer will be is selling you something. What a description buys you is walking into that call already knowing the names, the order and the questions, which is most of the difference between a process that takes weeks and one that takes seasons.

One more thing, because the Texas detail on this page can read like a fence. Jessica works with families nationwide through virtual coaching, with in-person roots in Austin and Central Texas. Texas is the worked example here because it is where the CDPAP confusion lands hardest, not because the rest of this stops at the state line. Every state runs some version of self-directed care under its own name, and the first useful move in any of them is finding out what yours is called.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is CDPAP available in Texas?

A: No. CDPAP is a New York State Medicaid program and does not operate in Texas. The Texas equivalent is Consumer Directed Services, which serves the same purpose of letting the person receiving care hire and pay their own attendant, including in many cases a family member. If searches for CDPAP in Texas have gone nowhere, this is why.

Q: Can I get paid to care for my parent in Texas?

A: Often yes, through Consumer Directed Services within a Medicaid program your parent qualifies for, such as the STAR+PLUS waiver or state plan attendant services. Your parent becomes the employer of record with a financial management agency handling payroll, and an adult child can generally be hired as the paid attendant.

Q: Can a spouse be paid as a caregiver in Texas?

A: Generally not through this route. Spouses are excluded, as are parents of minor children in the equivalent child programs, and New York’s CDPAP draws the same line. It is the exclusion families find hardest, because the spouse is often doing the most work. Where a spouse is the primary caregiver, the paid attendant may need to be an adult child or another relative genuinely providing care.

Q: How much does a family caregiver get paid in Texas?

A: There is no longer a published floor. The $10.60 attendant base wage requirement was discontinued on September 1, 2025, and Texas now builds its payment rates around an assumed personal attendant wage of currently $13.00 an hour under Rider 23 of the 2026-27 state budget. What an attendant is actually paid comes out of the adopted rate for the parent’s specific program and managed care plan, which HHSC publishes. Authorized hours come from the functional assessment rather than from the need described informally, which is why two families with similar situations can receive very different packages.

Q: How long does it take to start getting paid?

A: Texas does not publish a standard timeline for CDS setup. The sequence is the Medicaid eligibility determination, the functional assessment, enrollment with a financial management services agency, the employer and attendant paperwork, and the service plan, and where the program is the STAR+PLUS waiver there is an interest list ahead of all of it. The process does not accelerate in response to urgency, which is the argument for starting early rather than late.

Citations

• Texas HHS: Consumer Directed Services. The Texas self-directed option, and how a family member is hired and paid https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/disability/consumer-directed-services
• Texas Health and Human Services: STAR+PLUS. Waiver services and the CDS option https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/health/medicaid-chip/medicaid-chip-programs-services/starplus
• New York State Department of Health: Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program. The New York program itself, including who may not be hired as a personal assistant https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/longterm/cdpap/
• Texas HHSC Provider Finance Department: rate tables. Adopted payment rates for attendant and attendant-like services, and the Rider 23 changes effective September 1, 2025 https://pfd.hhs.texas.gov/rate-tables
• Texas HHS: Appendix XXXI, Budget Reference Chart. The income and resource limits used by the Medicaid for the Elderly and People with Disabilities programs https://www.hhs.texas.gov/handbooks/medicaid-elderly-people-disabilities-handbook/appendix-xxxi-budget-reference-chart
• Social Security Administration: SSI federal payment amounts for 2026. The $994 federal benefit rate the 300 percent special income limit is calculated from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/SSI.html
• Texas HHS: interest list reduction. What the state publishes about waiver interest lists and how they are worked https://www.hhs.texas.gov/about/records-statistics/interest-list-reduction
• Medicaid.gov: Self-Directed Services. How self-direction works across states https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/long-term-services-supports/self-directed-services
• Texas HHSC Information Letter No. 2025-25. Rider 23: the discontinuation of the personal attendant base wage and of the rate enhancement program, and the average hourly wage assumed in the methodology, effective September 1, 2025. https://www.hhs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/documents/il2025-25.pdf

Related reading

• How to get paid to care for a parent in Texas
• How to get paid to care for a family member
• Does Texas Medicaid cover in-home care? How to get the hours at home
• Does my parent qualify for Texas Medicaid? Income and asset limits
• What is the Texas STAR+PLUS waiver and does my parent qualify?
• How reactive caregiving costs families $750K, and what proactive planning saves
• Financial Wellness for Family Caregivers
• The Proactive Caregiver Method

About this article. Jessica Cannon is a CPA and a Certified Dementia Practitioner. She provides financial coaching, not legal or medical services. This article is general information about how these systems work, not advice about your situation, and it is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. It is not medical advice, and it is not individualized tax or financial advice. For the legal instruments themselves, including wills, powers of attorney and guardianship, you will need a licensed attorney in your own state. Medicaid and long-term care rules also differ by state and change over time, so any Texas detail here is an example rather than a rule that will apply to you.