How Long-Term Care Insurance Premiums Can Count as Medical Expenses in 2025

A Tax Angle That Often Goes Unnoticed

Long-term care insurance is usually discussed in terms of protection: covering the cost of a nursing home, assisted living, or in-home help if you can no longer handle daily activities on your own. What gets far less attention is the tax treatment of the premiums you pay for that coverage. For many people, this is the part of the conversation that never comes up until the paperwork is already on the kitchen table.

The basic idea is this: the IRS allows premiums you pay for a qualified long-term care insurance policy to be counted as medical expenses, subject to limits that rise with age. That treatment can matter when you are deciding whether to itemize deductions and how much of your out-of-pocket health spending is actually deductible.

The 2025 Age-Based Limits

For the 2025 tax year, the IRS sets a cap on how much of your qualified long-term care premiums can be counted as a medical expense. The limits are tied to your age at the end of the year. Two figures are especially relevant to readers who are 59 and older:

• §Ages 61 to 70: up to $4,810 per person
• §Age 71 or older: up to $6,020 per person

There are lower limits for younger ages as well, but for most people planning around retirement, these two brackets are the ones that come into play.

A crucial detail that people frequently miss: the limit is per person, not per couple. If both spouses hold qualifying policies, each spouse gets their own age-based cap. A married couple where one spouse is 68 and the other is 73 could count as much as $4,810 for the first spouse and $6,020 for the second, based on their individual ages, not a single shared ceiling.

What "Qualified" Actually Means

Not every insurance product labeled "long-term care" automatically qualifies for this treatment. To be a qualified long-term care insurance contract under the tax rules, the policy generally has to meet a set of consumer-protection standards. Among other things, it must provide coverage only for qualified long-term care services, cannot pay or reimburse expenses that are already covered by Medicare (except where Medicare is a secondary payer), and must be guaranteed renewable.

The practical takeaway is that you cannot assume a policy qualifies just because of its name. The insurance company can tell you whether your specific contract meets the definition, and that status is what determines whether the premiums fall under the age-based limits described above.

How the Deduction Fits Into the Bigger Picture

Even when your premiums are eligible, they do not translate dollar-for-dollar into a deduction. Qualified long-term care premiums are lumped in with your other medical expenses, and medical expenses are only deductible to the extent they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income (AGI).

Here is how that works in plain terms. Suppose your AGI is $60,000. The 7.5% threshold is $4,500. Only the portion of your total medical expenses above $4,500 can be deducted. So if your eligible long-term care premiums and other medical costs add up to $7,000, the deductible amount would be $2,500.

On top of that, medical expenses are an itemized deduction. If you take the standard deduction instead of itemizing, these expenses will not lower your tax bill at all. For 2025 the standard deduction is substantial, and many retirees find it exceeds what they could claim by itemizing. That means the long-term care premium rule is genuinely useful for some households and simply not relevant for others, depending on the full picture of income, deductions, and spending.

Why the Timing Matters

Open enrollment season and year-end paperwork tend to arrive at the same time. That is exactly when it helps to already understand what the rules say, rather than trying to sort it out under deadline pressure. Knowing the 2025 figures in advance lets you keep clean records of what you paid, confirm with your insurer whether your policy is a qualified contract, and get a realistic sense of whether the amounts involved will actually clear the 7.5% AGI threshold.

It is also worth noting that these limits are adjusted periodically. The $4,810 and $6,020 figures apply to 2025; the IRS has updated the age-based amounts in past years, so the numbers you use should always match the tax year you are filing for.

Points to Keep Straight

A few facts are easy to blur together, so it is worth restating them cleanly:

• §The limits are set per person and depend on age at year-end.
• §The premium amount you count is capped, but only qualified contracts are eligible in the first place.
• §Eligible premiums join your other medical expenses and are subject to the 7.5% of AGI floor.
• §The benefit only applies if you itemize deductions.

Long-term care planning involves far more than the tax code, but understanding how premiums are treated is one concrete piece you can nail down. The rules are specific, they change from year to year, and they reward people who keep good records and know the numbers before the paperwork stacks up.