What to Read Before You Sign an Austin Assisted Living Contract

By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · July 6, 2026

The tour sells the building. The contract sells the terms.

Almost every family we talk to made the decision on the tour. The dining room looked good, the director was warm, a resident said something kind in the hallway. Then a fifteen-page residency agreement arrived by email with a request to sign by Friday because a room was being held.

That document is the actual product. It sets the base rent, the mechanism that raises it, the conditions under which your parent can be asked to leave, and what happens to your deposit if the move does not work. None of that is on the tour.

You are allowed to take the agreement home. You are allowed to have a lawyer read it. A community that pressures you out of both of those things has told you something useful. Room availability in the Austin metro is genuinely tight in some submarkets, but a 48-hour read is not an unreasonable ask, and reputable operators grant it without friction.

Read it with a pen and a specific list. Below is the list. Every item on it has cost a real family real money.

The care-level assessment is the pricing engine, and you do not control it

Texas assisted living communities almost never charge one flat price. They charge base rent for the apartment, plus a care fee driven by a proprietary assessment that scores how much help your parent needs with bathing, dressing, toileting, transfers, medication administration, and behaviors. That score maps to a level, and the level maps to a dollar amount.

The assessment tool is written by the operator or its corporate parent. There is no state-standardized scoring instrument in Texas. Two communities can assess the same person the same week and land three hundred dollars apart because their point thresholds differ. This is the single biggest reason quoted prices are not comparable across buildings.

Find the re-assessment clause. It will say something like: the community may reassess at any time, and the resident agrees to pay the resulting level of care rate upon notice. Ask three questions in writing. How much notice do we get before a level change takes effect. How many days of increased help trigger a re-assessment. Can we appeal it, and to whom.

The pattern that catches families is a hospital stay. Someone goes to the hospital walking and comes back needing a two-person transfer. The community reassesses, the care level jumps two tiers, and the monthly bill rises by an amount nobody budgeted for at a moment when the family has no capacity to move anyone. Ask for the current published rate for every care level, top to bottom, before you sign. If they will not show you the full ladder, you cannot model your worst case.

One more thing that is not on the price sheet: whether the community is even licensed to keep your parent as needs increase. Texas HHSC licenses assisted living as Type A or Type B based on the resident's ability to evacuate, under 26 TAC 553.5, not on care acuity. A Type A resident must be able to evacuate without physical staff assistance and does not require routine attendance at night. A Type B license covers residents who need help evacuating, need nighttime attendance, or need help transferring to and from a wheelchair, though a Type B resident still must not be permanently bedfast. A Type A community can raise your care level right up to the point where it legally cannot keep your parent at all. See the Type A versus Type B explainer.

Ask for the rate increase history, not the rate increase policy

Every contract contains a clause allowing the community to raise the base rate with notice, usually 30 or 60 days. The clause tells you nothing. The number tells you everything.

Ask this exact question: what was the annual base rate increase for existing residents in each of the last three years, expressed as a percentage. Ask for it in writing. A community with a defensible history will answer. A community that will not answer is protecting a number it does not want you to see.

Watch for two separate escalators. Some agreements raise the base rent annually and separately re-price care levels annually. That is two increases in one year, and families frequently do not notice the second one because it arrives buried inside a care-level change.

Then do the arithmetic that matters. Take your all-in monthly quote, apply the historical increase rate for five years, and compare that to the assets you have to spend. Most Austin families discover their real question is not whether they can afford year one. It is whether they can afford year four. The cost overview walks through that projection.

The 30-day discharge clause

Find the section headed transfer, discharge, or termination. It will give the community the right to end the agreement on written notice, commonly 30 days, for reasons including needs exceeding the level of care the community can provide, nonpayment, and conduct that endangers others.

That first reason is broad by design and it is the one that gets used. If your parent's dementia progresses into exit-seeking or nighttime agitation, or if they become a two-person transfer, a community can determine that their needs exceed what it provides and start the 30-day clock. Thirty days is not much time to find, tour, qualify for, and move into a new setting.

Read the clause for what it obligates the community to do. Does it require a written explanation of the specific needs that cannot be met. Does it require the community to help identify alternatives. Does it allow you to fix the problem, for example by privately hiring additional caregiving hours, and stay. Some agreements permit outside private-duty caregivers in the apartment and some prohibit it. That distinction can be the difference between a move and no move.

If your parent has dementia, or is likely to develop it, ask specifically whether this community can serve them through progression or whether that requires a transfer. Memory care in Texas is not a license type. It requires a separate Alzheimer's certification under 26 TAC 553.27, which requires a Type B license, is verified by an on-site health and Life Safety Code inspection, and caps how many residents the certified unit may serve. A building with a memory care hallway and no certification is a building your parent will eventually leave.

You can verify current license status and Alzheimer's certification yourself at TULIP, tulip.hhs.texas.gov, and pull inspection and deficiency history from the legacy system at apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch. Do that before signing, not after.

What all-inclusive excludes

All-inclusive is a marketing phrase, not a contract term. In the agreement it will be defined narrowly, and the definition is where your budget breaks.

Go through the fee schedule line by line and confirm whether each of these is included or billed separately: medication administration, incontinence supplies, an escort to and from the dining room, transportation to medical appointments outside a set radius, beauty salon services, cable and internet, laundry versus linen service, guest meals, and any charge tied to a resident using a call pendant more than a stated number of times per month. That last one exists and families never expect it.

Pharmacy is its own trap. Many communities require residents to use a contracted pharmacy. That can be fine, or it can mean giving up a mail-order price your parent has been paying for years. Ask whether the pharmacy is mandatory and whether it bills through your parent's Part D plan.

Ask what happens to the bill when your parent is in the hospital. Most agreements charge full rent during a hospitalization to hold the apartment, which is standard, but some also continue to bill the care level that is not being delivered. Ask for the bed-hold terms in writing.

Finally, ask what is not billed by the community at all but will still land on you: private-duty caregiving hours if help is needed beyond what staff provides, home health, hospice, and durable medical equipment. Texas median for a non-medical home caregiver is $30 an hour in the 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey. If a community's answer to rising needs is that the family can bring in outside help, price that help before you accept the answer.

Deposits, second-person fees, and the refund math

Community fees or move-in fees in the Austin market are typically a one-time charge of a few thousand dollars, and the contract will tell you how much of it is refundable and for how long. Read that provision closely. Some agreements refund on a sliding scale that hits zero after 30 or 60 days. Some refund nothing after move-in.

The scenario to price is the one where the placement fails fast. Your parent moves in, does poorly, and either you or the community ends the agreement in week three. What do you get back of the community fee, and what do you owe of the remaining month? A contract that keeps the full fee and requires 30 days of rent on a three-week stay is not unusual. Know that going in.

If both parents are moving in, find the second-person fee. It is usually a flat monthly amount on top of the apartment rate, and it covers meals and general services for the second resident but not their care level. Two residents can generate two independent care assessments in one apartment. Ask for a full quote showing base rent, second-person fee, and both care levels priced separately.

Then ask the question families avoid: if one spouse dies or moves to a higher level of care, what happens to the survivor's rate. Some agreements keep the survivor at the two-person apartment rate until renewal. That can leave a widow paying for a two-bedroom on one income at exactly the wrong moment.

Arbitration, and the Medicaid question that decides everything

Most residency agreements now contain a binding arbitration clause and a jury trial waiver. In practice, signing it means that if something serious happens, your family resolves it in private arbitration rather than in court. Arbitration is generally not a precondition of admission where it is presented as optional, and some operators will strike it if you ask. Ask. The worst answer is no.

Check who is signing. If you sign as responsible party rather than solely as agent under a power of attorney, you may be accepting personal financial liability for the account. Sign as agent, in your parent's name, and write the capacity out. If the agreement requires a personal guarantee, have a lawyer look at it before you initial anything.

Now the question that most often determines whether a placement survives: what happens when the money runs out. Texas has no broad state-funded assisted living benefit. The main route is the STAR+PLUS HCBS waiver, which covers assisted living care services but not room and board, is interest-list driven, and for 2026 requires income under $2,982 a month for a single applicant, countable assets under $2,000, and a Nursing Facility Level of Care determination. A home and one vehicle are generally exempt. There is also a small non-Medicaid Residential Care option under Community Care for the Aged and Disabled, funded by the Title XX block grant, also interest-list driven.

So ask the community directly: do you accept STAR+PLUS residents, in this building, in what quantity, and will you keep a private-pay resident who converts. Many Austin-area communities are private pay only and will discharge on nonpayment regardless of how long someone has lived there. If the honest answer is that your parent will be asked to leave when funds are exhausted, you need to know that in year one, not year four, because the alternative planning, including nursing facility Medicaid and the interest list, takes time you will not have later. Get on the STAR+PLUS interest list now by calling 2-1-1 or applying at YourTexasBenefits.com, even if you do not expect to need it. See the STAR+PLUS overview and what happens when the money runs out.

If a term in the agreement worries you and you want a second opinion before you sign, the long-term care ombudsman is free and does not work for the facility. In the Austin area that is the Capital Area Area Agency on Aging, 512-916-6054 or 888-622-9111 option 3, at 6800 Burleson Road, Building 310, Suite 165, Austin 78744. They cover Travis, Williamson, Hays and seven other counties. To report a problem at a licensed facility, HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake is 1-800-458-9858, Monday through Friday, 7am to 7pm Central.

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