How San Antonio veterans treated at the Audie L. Murphy VA Medical Center can use the VA Aid and Attendance benefit to help pay for assisted living or in-home senior care.
By San Antonio Senior Advisor Care Team · August 18, 2026
The Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital, part of the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, sits on the South Texas Medical Center campus at 7400 Merton Minter Boulevard and serves as the hub for VA medical care across a wide swath of South and Central Texas. For aging veterans and their families in San Antonio, it is often the starting point for conversations about long-term care — whether that means a geriatric primary care referral, a social work consult after a hospital stay, or help understanding VA benefits like Aid and Attendance that can offset the cost of assisted living. Because the medical center's geriatrics and extended care service works directly with the VA's pension and benefits side, a veteran being seen at Audie Murphy has an unusually direct path to both a clinical eligibility determination and a benefits application in the same system.
San Antonio's veteran population is one of the largest of any U.S. metro area, driven in part by proximity to Joint Base San Antonio and a large retiree community that chose to stay near military medical infrastructure. That means local assisted living communities and memory care facilities are accustomed to working with VA paperwork, and several — particularly those near Fort Sam Houston, Stone Oak, and the Medical Center area — actively market themselves to VA Aid and Attendance recipients. Families researching options should still verify any facility's Texas HHSC license directly at apps.hhs.texas.gov/HSPubDisclosure rather than relying on a community's own claims about VA partnerships.
Aid and Attendance is not a stand-alone VA program — it is a increased monthly pension amount added on top of the VA's Improved Pension for wartime veterans (or their surviving spouses) who need help with daily activities like bathing, dressing, eating, or are bedridden, in a nursing home due to physical or mental incapacity, or have limited eyesight. For 2026, the maximum annual Aid and Attendance pension rate for a single veteran runs into the mid-$27,000s and higher for a veteran with a spouse, though the exact figure a household receives depends on countable income and unreimbursed medical expenses, including assisted living or in-home care costs. The benefit is paid directly to the veteran or surviving spouse, not to the facility, which means it can be applied toward assisted living, memory care, in-home caregiving, or even adult day programs.
Eligibility requires the veteran to have served at least 90 days of active duty with at least one day during a VA-recognized wartime period, an other-than-dishonorable discharge, and to meet the VA's net worth and income limits after medical expense deductions. Because assisted living costs in San Antonio typically run well above what many veterans' pension income alone covers, the deduction of those costs from countable income is often what makes a household newly eligible even if they didn't qualify for the base pension before. A social worker at Audie Murphy VA Medical Center or an accredited Veterans Service Officer through the Texas Veterans Commission (tvc.texas.gov) can walk through the specific math for a given household.
The application itself is filed with the VA Pension Management Center, not at the medical center, but Audie Murphy's clinical staff play a critical supporting role: a physician's statement describing the veteran's need for aid and attendance (VA Form 21-2680) is one of the most important pieces of supporting evidence, and it typically needs to be completed by a treating physician who has actually examined the veteran. Scheduling that exam through the veteran's existing Audie Murphy primary care or geriatrics team is usually faster than trying to get a private physician unfamiliar with VA forms to complete it correctly the first time.
Families should also connect with an accredited Veterans Service Officer (VSO) before filing — accredited VSOs, available through the Texas Veterans Commission, Bexar County Veterans Service Office, and organizations like the DAV and VFW, cannot charge a fee and can help avoid the documentation errors that cause the VA to return or delay applications. A typical Aid and Attendance claim, once filed complete with medical evidence, has been taking several months to a year to process in recent years, so families weighing an assisted living move in San Antonio should not wait for benefit approval before starting the search — most communities will accept a pending VA claim as part of a family's financial plan, with the benefit applied retroactively to the filing date once approved.
Because Audie Murphy VA Medical Center anchors the South Texas Medical Center area, many families look first at assisted living and memory care communities in the surrounding neighborhoods — Medical Center, Oak Hills, and the broader Northwest San Antonio corridor — so ongoing VA appointments, lab work, and specialty clinics remain a short drive away rather than requiring a cross-town trip. This is especially relevant for veterans managing multiple chronic conditions who see VA specialists regularly, since continuity of care can matter as much as the assisted living community itself.
When evaluating a community for a veteran likely to receive Aid and Attendance, ask directly whether the facility has experience itemizing costs in the format the VA requires for medical expense deductions — this is different from a standard invoice and needs to break out the portion of monthly fees attributable to personal care services. Confirm the facility's HHSC license type (Type A for veterans who are ambulatory and can self-preserve in an emergency, Type B for those who need evacuation assistance or have cognitive impairment) matches the veteran's actual care needs, and cross-check any licensing or inspection history directly through HHSC rather than taking a sales tour's word for it.
Aid and Attendance rarely covers the full cost of assisted living in San Antonio on its own, which is why families often combine it with other resources. The Alamo Area Council of Governments (AACOG), the local Area Agency on Aging at (210) 362-5200 and aacog.com, can connect veterans and their families to additional benefits counseling, caregiver support programs, and — for veterans who also qualify financially — Medicaid's STAR+PLUS home and community-based services waiver, which is a separate program from VA benefits and has its own eligibility rules and application through Texas HHSC.
For veterans transitioning directly from a hospital stay at Audie Murphy or another San Antonio hospital into assisted living, the discharge planning social worker is often the single best resource for coordinating VA benefits, Medicaid options, and a realistic care-level assessment all at once, since they can see the veteran's full clinical picture and flag whether Aid and Attendance alone is likely to be sufficient or whether the family should also pursue STAR+PLUS or private-pay bridge funding.
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