By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · September 23, 2026
Texas gives you seven days to walk away from a continuing care contract and a legal right to the community's financial disclosure statement. Both rules changed on January 1, 2026, and most sales offices have not updated their scripts.
Why this contract is different from every other one you will sign
Most senior care in the Austin area is bought month to month. You sign a residency agreement, you pay for the month, and if it goes badly you give notice and leave. An assisted living contract is a lease with services attached to it.
A continuing care retirement community is not that. You hand over a large sum of money up front, sometimes six figures, in exchange for a promise about the next twenty years of your life. The promise is that when independent living stops working, assisted living and nursing care will be there on the same campus, at a priority or a discount, without a second search and a second move.
Texas treats that arrangement as a financial product rather than a housing arrangement, which is why the agency that regulates it is the Texas Department of Insurance, not the health agency that licenses everything else in this field. A community that requires an entrance fee has to hold a certificate of authority from TDI under Chapter 246 of the Health and Safety Code, the Texas Continuing Care Facility Disclosure and Rehabilitation Act.
That distinction is the whole reason this post exists. The instincts you have built touring assisted living do not transfer here. You are not evaluating a building. You are evaluating whether an organization will still be solvent in 2046.
What counts as an entrance fee, in the statute's own terms
The law does not care what the sales office calls the payment. Section 246.002 defines an entrance fee as money or property, transferred up front or deferred, valued at more than three months' worth of rent or services, paid as consideration for the community accepting the resident under a continuing care contract.
A continuing care contract is an agreement requiring that entrance fee in exchange for continuing care, effective either for the resident's life or for more than one year.
So the threshold is three months. A community charging a one-month community fee is not in Chapter 246 territory. One charging the equivalent of a year of rent to get in the door almost certainly is, whatever the line item is named.
There is a real exclusion worth knowing. As of this year, Section 246.0215 says the chapter does not apply to an entrance-fee community where residents pay for assisted living and nursing care fee-for-service at the same rates a newcomer would pay, and where the agreement carries a conspicuous statement saying so. If you see that boldfaced paragraph in the contract, you are being told, correctly, that you are not buying priority access to future care. You are buying an apartment with an unusually large move-in fee. That is a legitimate model. It is just a different product, and it is not regulated as continuing care.
The seven days you probably were not told about
Section 246.056 gives you a rescission right. You may cancel a continuing care contract until midnight of the seventh day after the later of two dates: the day you signed, or the day you received a disclosure statement that actually meets the statute's requirements.
Read that ordering again, because it is the part that matters. If the community handed you the contract on Monday and the disclosure statement three weeks later, your seven days run from the disclosure statement, not from the signature. A community that delays the financial paperwork is extending your window, not shortening it.
The statute also says you cannot be required to move in before the rescission period expires. Nobody can hand you keys on day two and treat occupancy as a waiver.
If you rescind, the refund clock is thirty days. The 2025 amendment tightened the language here: the statute now speaks in terms of refunding the entrance fee, rather than the older and vaguer formulation about assets transferred. The community may still keep periodic charges for days a unit was actually occupied.
Seven days is not long. Treat it as a deadline for a decision you have already made rather than a period in which to start evaluating. The evaluating happens before you sign.
The disclosure statement, and the new right to simply ask for it
The disclosure statement is the document this entire chapter is built around, and it is the one thing you should not leave a sales office without.
Section 246.042 requires a community holding a certificate of authority to deliver it to you before the earlier of two events: you sign the contract, or any entrance fee or nonrefundable deposit changes hands. Whichever comes first. If money moved before you had the document, the law was not followed.
Here is what changed on January 1, 2026. Senate Bill 1522 added a new subsection to Section 246.004 requiring the facility to give a resident, a prospective resident, or their designated agent, on request, an electronic or paper copy of the most recently revised disclosure statement on file with the commissioner. You no longer have to be a signer, or close to signing, to read it. An adult child in Round Rock vetting a community for a parent can ask for it cold.
The same bill made it an offense to use the phrase continuing care retirement community in advertising without holding a certificate of authority. If a brochure uses the term, the certificate is now a fair thing to ask about on the spot.
What is in the document: who the provider actually is, whether a third party manages the property, the physical property itself, the fee structure, financial statements, and any change of circumstances. Under Section 246.049 the provider has to disclose material changes. Read the financial statements even if you read nothing else, or hand them to someone who reads them for a living.
And read the cover page, which Section 246.043 requires to carry a conspicuous date and a plain warning that no government agency has approved the statement or verified that anything in it is accurate. TDI collects it. TDI does not certify it. The state is telling you, on the first page, to do your own homework.
What your money sits in before you move in
Chapter 246 requires entrance fees to be escrowed rather than spent, and the escrow agent must be a bank or trust company located in Texas. The 2025 amendment clarified the trigger: the escrow obligation attaches if a provider accepts a reservation deposit or any portion of an entrance fee before the date you are authorized to occupy your unit.
One narrow carve-out arrived with the same bill. A waitlist fee of $1,000 or less does not have to be escrowed, nor does a genuinely nonrefundable portion of a deposit. Austin communities with long waitlists collect these routinely. A small waitlist fee is normal; ask whether it is refundable and get the answer in the contract rather than in conversation.
For a community still under construction, or expanding its unit count by half or more, Section 246.073 controls when escrowed money can be released to the developer. Broadly: half the units reserved under signed contracts, deposits of at least ten percent of each reserved unit's entrance fee in hand, and financing commitments substantially satisfied. If you are looking at a project that has not opened, those milestones are the real construction timeline, more so than the rendering on the easel.
Section 246.074 sets an outer limit. If your entrance fee has not been released to the provider or moved into the required loan reserve escrow within thirty-six months, or within a longer period the disclosure statement itself specifies, it comes back to you.
Section 246.057 covers the hardest version of this. If the resident dies before occupying the unit, or becomes incapacitated to the point of being unable to occupy it, the contract is cancelled and the money is refunded, less certain costs and charges. The 2025 amendment added that money paid for optional modifications to the unit, under a separate agreement, can be deducted. If you are paying to upgrade a kitchen before anyone moves in, that money now sits in a different category from the entrance fee.
Three phone calls before you write the check
Call TDI at 800-252-3439 and confirm the certificate of authority is current. TDI runs the Help Line for exactly this and also takes CCRC complaints through its online portal. TDI's own consumer page is blunt about the limits of its role: it regulates CCRCs that charge an entrance fee, and it does not regulate their rates or their contract language. Nobody at the state is going to tell you the price is fair.
Look up the licensed portions separately. The independent living apartments on an Austin campus are not licensed by the health agency, but the assisted living and nursing wings are, and they hold their own licenses with their own inspection histories. They appear in the HHSC Long-term Care Provider Search at apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch under their own legal names, which frequently differ from the campus brand. The TDI certificate tells you nothing about how the nursing wing performed on its last survey. Our guide to reading an HHSC inspection report applies to those wings exactly as it does anywhere else, and there is a walkthrough on our verify a license page.
Know which number to call later. If something goes wrong in the licensed assisted living or nursing portion, that is HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake at 1-800-458-9858. The long-term care ombudsman for the Austin metro is at the Capital Area Council of Governments Area Agency on Aging, 512-916-6054, and the ombudsman's authority reaches the licensed assisted living and nursing beds on the campus, not the independent living apartments. One caution: TDI's consumer page still routes care complaints to the Department of Aging and Disability Services, an agency folded into HHSC back in 2017. The phone number is still right. The agency name is nine years stale.
A fourth call, if the numbers are large: an attorney or a financial adviser who has read one of these before. TDI's own advice is to have the contract reviewed, and it is the rare situation where that suggestion is coming from the regulator rather than from someone selling the review.
The number nobody publishes
We will not give you an Austin entrance fee figure, because there is no source for one. The 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey, which is where the monthly medians on our cost page come from, surveys assisted living, nursing and in-home rates. It does not survey CCRC entrance fees, in Texas or anywhere. No state agency publishes a table of them either.
What exists instead is better than a median: each community's own disclosure statement, with its own fee schedule, filed with the commissioner and revised annually under Section 246.054. If you are comparing two Austin campuses, you can compare the actual documents. That is not true of anything else in senior care.
For context on the recurring side, the CareScout Texas statewide median for assisted living in a private one-bedroom is $5,666 a month, and for a private nursing room $250 a day. Those are Texas medians, not Austin figures, and Austin generally runs above them. A CCRC monthly fee is a different animal anyway, because part of what you prepaid is meant to buy down the cost of the later, more expensive levels of care.
The question to bring to the table is not what the entrance fee costs. It is what percentage is refundable, on what schedule, to whom, and what the contract says happens if the community needs your unit reoccupied before that refund is due.
What the contract cannot take away
Section 246.004 has always said that a resident receiving care in the licensed assisted living or nursing portion of a campus is entitled to every statutory right a resident of a freestanding assisted living facility or nursing home would have. Signing a continuing care contract does not convert your mother into a different category of resident once she moves to the health center. Our resident rights page covers what those are.
The 2025 bill added a second protection: a continuing care contract or reservation agreement may not prohibit residents from assembling. Resident associations exist on most Austin campuses, and they are the mechanism by which residents learn about a fee increase before it arrives in the mail.
There is also a structural change worth understanding. TDI may now reject a certificate application from a provider that does not own the land the community sits on, and it may order actuarial reviews more often than the standard five-year interval when a facility leases its grounds or buildings from a third party. The legislature was worried about what happens to residents when a ground lease ends or a provider hits solvency trouble. That is a reasonable thing for you to be worried about too. Ask who owns the dirt.
None of this is a reason to avoid a CCRC. For the right household, at the right age, with the right advice, pooling the risk of a long decline is exactly the point, and doing it once beats doing it in an emergency at 2 a.m. in a hospital hallway. It is a reason to take the seven days seriously, read the disclosure statement, and ask the questions while you still have leverage.
If you are weighing a continuing care contract against staying put with help brought in, or against a straightforward independent living move, we talk families through that comparison at no cost. Our page on how Austin families pay for senior care is a reasonable next stop.
