The aca subsidy income limits are not one number, and any page that prints one is selling you half a map. For 2026 the limits form a band — a floor where the premium tax credit starts, a ceiling where it stops dead, and surveyed lines inside it where Medicaid, cost-sharing help and enrolment windows change. This article prints the whole band for every household size, twice: the table that governs 2026 coverage (built on the 2025 HHS poverty guidelines), and the table already published for 2027 coverage (the 2026 guidelines) — because the healthcare.gov income limits you will meet at the next open enrollment are the second set, not the first.

The 2026 table: every band, every household size

These are the income requirements for marketplace insurance subsidies for the 2026 coverage year, 48 contiguous states and DC. Find your household size, read across: the 100% column is the guideline itself, and each later column is that guideline multiplied by the percentage in its header.

Three columns do most of the work. 100% is the credit’s floor: earn less and the premium tax credit does not start (what happens below the floor depends on your state — the Medicaid section below). 138% is the Medicaid-expansion line: in the 40 states plus DC that expanded Medicaid, adults at or below it are generally covered by Medicaid instead of a subsidised plan. 400% is the ceiling, and for 2026 it is a cliff: one dollar over the 400% figure for your household size and the credit is zero — the enhanced schedule that softened this edge expired at the end of 2025. The columns between are the cost-sharing map: Silver plans carry reduced deductibles and copays from 100% to 250%, in tiers that step down at 150% and 200%.

Whose income, whose household: the fine print on every row

The household size in the first column is your tax household — you, a spouse you file jointly with, and the dependents you claim — and the income measured against the row is that household’s combined modified adjusted gross income. Two rules surprise people every year. First, a dependent’s income counts toward the household total only if it is high enough that the dependent must file their own return; a teenager’s small part-time wages generally stay out. Second, married couples must generally file jointly to claim the credit at all — married filing separately closes the window regardless of where the income lands (narrow exceptions exist for domestic abuse and abandonment, administered through the marketplace and the return). And one definition carries the whole table: income means MAGI — adjusted gross income plus tax-exempt interest, excluded foreign income and untaxed Social Security benefits. A household that tracks only its wages will misread its row whenever a pension, a rental property or tax-exempt bond interest is in the mix; the calculator’s guide walks the MAGI build line by line.

The cost-sharing staircase inside the band

Between 100% and 250%, a second set of limits runs underneath the credit, attached to Silver plans only. From 100% to 150% of the poverty level, a Silver plan’s actuarial value — the share of expected costs the plan itself pays — rises from the standard 70% to 94%, with deductibles compressed to near-Medicaid levels. From 150% to 200% the tier is 87%; from 200% to 250%, 73%. Above 250% the reductions end and Silver reverts to a plain 70% — one reason the 250% column matters even to households comfortably inside the credit window: cross it and the same plan, at a similar premium, suddenly leaves thousands more of a hospital bill with you. These tiers are invisible in premium comparisons, which is why two households can pay identical premiums in adjacent columns of the table and receive very different insurance. When you locate your row, note not just the credit it implies but the tier you are standing in — and whether a small income change, in either direction, steps you between tiers.

Alaska and Hawaii run the identical percentages off higher guidelines. For 2026 coverage the 100% line is $19,550 for one person in Alaska and $17,990 in Hawaii; for a family of four, $40,190 and $36,980 — so the 400% ceilings are $78,200 and $71,960 for one person, $160,760 and $147,920 for four. Households over eight add $5,500 per extra person to the mainland guideline ($6,880 Alaska, $6,330 Hawaii) before multiplying.

How a row becomes a decision

Read the table the way the marketplace reads it. A household of three estimating $53,300 of income divides by their guideline, $26,650, and lands on exactly 200% — mid-window for the credit, at the last line of the 87% cost-sharing tier. The same household at $70,000 sits at 262.7%: still comfortably credited, but past the 250% line, so no cost-sharing reductions whatever plan they buy. And at $107,000 — just over the $106,600 ceiling for three — the credit vanishes entirely. The obamacare income limits most people picture as a single threshold are really this staircase: nothing about the family’s finances changed at those lines except which paragraph of the law applies to them. Knowing which step you are standing on — and which step a raise, a bonus or a second job would move you to — is the entire practical use of this table.

Below the floor: Medicaid, CHIP and the gap

The table’s most important row is the one it does not print: what happens under 100%. In expansion states, the answer is Medicaid — adults qualify on income alone up to the 138% column, and the marketplace routes them there automatically. Children reach further in every state: children’s Medicaid and CHIP thresholds run to 200% of the poverty level and well beyond in most states, which is why a household can straddle the systems — Medicaid children, subsidised parents, one application. In the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming — an adult can fall into the gap the table implies: above their state’s traditional Medicaid limits (often very low for parents, and nonexistent for childless adults) yet below the 100% floor where credits begin. If that is your position, apply anyway: pregnancy, disability and parent-of-young-children categories follow different rules, and an income rise later in the year can move you into the credit window.

The 2027 table, already published

HHS published the 2026 poverty guidelines in January 2026, and by law they govern 2027 coverage — the plans whose open enrollment runs November 1, 2026 to January 15, 2027 on HealthCare.gov. The healthcare marketplace income limits move up slightly with them:

The IRS has published the matching 2027 contribution table (Rev. Proc. 2026-26): the same original ACA schedule, indexed — 2.15% of income under 133% of the poverty level, rising to 10.22% across 300–400%, with the 400% cliff intact. A single person at $30,000, to preview the shift, sits at 188.0% of the 2027 guideline instead of 191.7%, with a 6.18% applicable percentage. Small numbers, same architecture: the staircase is a permanent feature of the law now that the 2021–2025 enhancement has ended.

Moving between rows mid-year

The row you enrol on is a forecast, and life edits forecasts. A raise, a lost job, a spouse’s new position, a baby — each one moves your household’s percentage, and the rules treat the move differently depending on direction. Medicaid and CHIP enrol year-round, so a fall below the 138% line in an expansion state can be acted on immediately. Marketplace coverage changes run through special enrollment periods and reported life events, generally within 60 days of the change. The settlement, as always, happens at filing: Form 8962 recomputes the credit on the income you actually had, month by month, and the difference lands on the return — added refund if your income fell short of the estimate, added tax if it ran over, with no repayment cap from tax year 2026. The practical habit the table should build: whenever your income changes by an amount that could move you a column — and especially whenever it approaches the 400% row — report the change and re-run the estimate. The bands are fixed; your position on them is not.

Last year’s limits, for the record

Searches for the aca subsidy income limits 2025 still arrive daily, so here is the honest historical note. Coverage year 2025 used the 2024 guidelines — $15,060 for one person, putting its 100% floor there and its nominal 400% figure at $60,240 — but the number that mattered in 2025 was not the ceiling, because the enhanced schedule then in force charged nobody more than 8.5% of income for the benchmark plan, at any income. The obama care income limits of 2021–2025 were, in effect, a floor without a ceiling. That regime ended on December 31, 2025. Anyone whose habits were formed in those years — estimating loosely, assuming a raise cannot hurt — is working from a repealed map; the two tables above are the current ones, and every figure on them is recomputed from the HHS guidelines for its year.