LIHEAP income eligibility limits by state and household size

LIHEAP (federal home heating/cooling energy assistance) sets a national floor -- 110% of the federal poverty guideline, or 60% of state median income if higher -- but leaves the actual cutoff to each state, and states pick anywhere up to 150-175% FPG or their own SMI schedule and re-publish it once a year in dollars per household size. The one federal aggregator (the LIHEAP Clearinghouse) that used to compile all 50 states into one table is unreachable (SSL certificate failure, verified 2026-08-20) and third-party benefit-screening sites reproduce it without sourcing which state page they read it from or when. Each record is one state x one household size x one program season, stating the income ceiling, whether it is annual or monthly, and the percent-of-FPG or SMI basis the state used. Answers 'do I qualify for LIHEAP in [state] with a household of [n] and [income]', 'what's the LIHEAP income limit for a family of 4 in [state] this year'.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 5 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• csd.ca.govhttps://www.csd.ca.gov/Pages/LIHEAP-Income-Eligibility.aspx
• pa.govhttps://www.pa.gov/agencies/dhs/resources/liheap
• puco.ohio.govhttps://puco.ohio.gov/utilities/electricity/resources/income-guidelines-for-utility-assistance
• dam.assets.ohio.govhttps://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/v1750956199/development.ohio.gov/individual/energyassistance/2025-2026_HEAP_application_B_W.pdf
• tdhca.texas.govhttps://www.tdhca.texas.gov/community-affairs-income-guidelines

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup liheap-income-eligibility-by-state row_id=CA-1-2026

npx -y refsource lookup liheap-income-eligibility-by-state row_id=CA-1-2026

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "LIHEAP income eligibility limits by state and household size", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `liheap-income-eligibility-by-state`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

43 records. last verified against source 2026-08-25. due for re-check by 2027-08-25.

Licence. Facts extracted from state government pages; benefit income limits are not copyrightable