How are Alaska and Hawaii cost-of-living adjustments determined for FPL in 2026?
Executive summary
Alaska and Hawaii’s 2026 Federal Poverty Levels (FPLs) are higher than the contiguous U.S. because HHS issues separate guidelines for those states and updates the guidelines by applying the year‑over‑year change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI‑U) to the Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds; for 2026 that process produced $19,950 for Alaska and $18,360 for Hawaii versus $15,960 for the contiguous 48 states and D.C. [1] [2] [3]. The mechanics include a CPI‑U inflation adjustment, special administrative practice for Alaska and Hawaii, and procedural fixes for rounding or anomalous decreases; an October 2025 data gap due to a federal shutdown also affected the 2026 comparison period [4] [1].
1. How the update rule works: CPI‑U applied to Census thresholds
The statutory HHS procedure begins with the Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds and increases them by the percentage change in the CPI‑U between the two most recent calendar years; HHS then publishes poverty guidelines (often called FPL) for program use after that inflation adjustment—HHS stated that the 2026 guidelines reflect a 2.63 percent price increase between 2024 and 2025 [1] [4]. Because of the October 2025 federal shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not publish the CPI‑U for that month, so HHS’s calculation compared the average CPI‑U for the 11 available months of 2025 with the average for all 12 months of 2024, a methodological caveat HHS/ASPE explicitly notes for the 2026 figures [4].
2. Why Alaska and Hawaii are different: administrative practice, not a separate Census threshold
The separate, higher dollar figures for Alaska and Hawaii trace to an administrative practice dating back to the late 1960s and are implemented in the annual HHS poverty‑guideline notice rather than by separate Census poverty thresholds; the Census poverty thresholds themselves have never included distinct figures for Alaska and Hawaii, so HHS produces adjusted guidelines to reflect higher local costs [1] [4]. In short, the “COLA” for Alaska and Hawaii is not a state‑specific CPI formula unique to each state in 2026 but the result of HHS issuing separate guideline amounts that are larger than the contiguous‑U.S baseline to account for higher costs [1] [4].
3. The 2026 outcomes and program effects
Applying the 2026 adjustment produced census‑based, HHS‑published guideline amounts of $19,950 for one person in Alaska and $18,360 for one person in Hawaii, compared with $15,960 for the contiguous U.S. [2] [3]. Those dollar levels are the basis for eligibility and means tests across many programs—Medicaid/CHIP, premium tax credits, and SNAP income standards—and feed into related program computations such as SNAP allotments and net income limits, which are likewise adjusted for cost‑of‑living factors for Alaska and Hawaii in federal agency tables [5] [6].
4. Calculation details, rounding rules, and edge cases that matter to implementers
HHS applies the CPI‑U percentage to the most recent published Census thresholds and then standardizes and rounds results, with an explicit rule to hold guideline amounts at the prior year’s level if the arithmetic, rounding, or standardization would otherwise reduce a guideline even when inflation is non‑negative—a protection against anomalous decreases [1]. For employer‑and‑insurer related affordability calculations, practitioners convert annual FPL differences into monthly figures or percentages (for example, Mercer illustrated monthly equivalents and percent‑of‑FPL calculations for Alaska and Hawaii in 2026), but those operational conversions vary by program and regulatory context [2].
5. Disagreements, estimates, and reporting caveats
Independent outlets and advisory services occasionally publish estimates using alternative inflation assumptions—some early 2026 writeups assumed larger increases (for example, a 3.5% estimate used by one private calculator) and thus predicted different FPLs, highlighting that pre‑publication estimates can diverge from the official HHS notice [7]. Reporters and program administrators should therefore rely on the HHS/ASPE and Federal Register notice as the authoritative source for 2026 FPLs and note the methodological footnotes—particularly the 11‑month CPI treatment due to the October 2025 data gap—when explaining year‑to‑year changes [1] [4].