Congress folded new money for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program into the stopgap spending bill it passed earlier this month, and that funding is now sitting at the Department of Health and Human Services. It has not gone out the door. Thirty-one senators, led by New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, spent September 17 publicly pressing the administration to release it before winter arrives, pointing to home heating oil prices in New York that have jumped 66 percent in a year. The pattern is familiar: the same program’s final payment for last year’s heating season did not clear until deep into spring, and older households living on a fixed income are the ones a late check hits hardest.
Money Appropriated, Not Yet Distributed
The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 became law in early September and, according to Gillibrand’s September 17 letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., made LIHEAP funding available to the Department of Health and Human Services for distribution. Available is not the same as disbursed. ACF, the HHS division that administers the program, is the office that must formally issue a release before a single state can draw down its share, and its public log of every LIHEAP funding release still lists the final Fiscal Year 2026 block grant, dated April 17, as the most recent entry. No Fiscal Year 2027 release appears. That gap is the entire basis for the senators’ letter: Congress wrote the appropriation into law weeks ago, but the money still has to clear HHS before it reaches a single state energy office, and that step has not happened. A separate, unrelated fight over the program’s future is underway at the same time. The administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request proposes eliminating LIHEAP entirely, a proposal that has not been enacted and is not the reason this year’s already-appropriated funding is sitting still.
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A Ten Percent Balance That Waited Until Spring
This is not the first time the calendar and the appropriation have disagreed. For Fiscal Year 2026, HHS released about $3.6 billion, 90 percent of the program’s $4.015 billion allocation, on November 28, 2025, once the continuing resolution that ended that year’s government shutdown became law. The remaining roughly $421 million, the final 10 percent states use to close out a heating season, did not move until months later. The American Public Power Association, whose member utilities administer LIHEAP crisis payments directly, reported the balance reaching states by April 20, 2026, after the Office of Management and Budget filed for repeated extensions past the program’s 30-day legal deadline for releasing that final tranche. A benefit built around January and February heating bills closed its books for the season with money that arrived closer to the last frost than the first one. Congress had already added $20 million to the Fiscal Year 2026 total in February, and the extension fight over that last slice is the direct precedent behind what senators are now warning could happen again with the new fiscal year’s money.
Sixty-Six Percent More For A Gallon Of Heating Oil
The number that makes this year’s delay urgent is the price of fuel, not the size of the program. Average home heating oil in New York reached $6.14 a gallon by September 14, a 66 percent increase from the same week a year earlier, a jump that Gillibrand’s letter and her September 17 press conference both tied to a spike in global crude prices. New York alone stands to receive an estimated $360 million once the federal money moves, paid out as a direct credit to a household’s utility company or fuel dealer rather than as cash a recipient manages directly. For a retiree heating a home with oil at that price, a delayed disbursement is not just paperwork sitting in a queue. It is the difference between a fuel delivery covered in December and one covered, if the Fiscal Year 2026 timeline repeats, only after the coldest weeks have already passed. Rising crude prices do not pause for an appropriations delay, and neither does a furnace running through a cold snap.
States Have Moved The Shutoff Line Without Waiting On Washington Before
An unreleased federal balance does not automatically leave a household unprotected, because states run their own application calendars and utility shutoff rules regardless of when HHS wires the money. Pennsylvania faced an almost identical mismatch last year: a federal government shutdown pushed the start of its 2025-26 LIHEAP season past its usual November opening, so Governor Josh Shapiro worked with the state’s Public Utility Commission and utility providers to move the annual winter shutoff moratorium up to November 1, 2025, ahead of the delayed application window, so households were not exposed to disconnection while the federal award caught up. That season, once it opened, paid participating Pennsylvania households an average of $291 in cash assistance and an average of $523 in crisis grants for anyone already facing a termination notice or a fuel supply under two weeks’ worth, real relief, but tied to the state’s own application calendar rather than to Washington’s release date. A household does not need a federal release date to start a LIHEAP application. It needs its own state or local administering agency’s application window, which the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services opened for last season on December 3, 2025, on a schedule the state sets itself, delayed federal money or not.
Heating Costs Are One Piece Of A Larger Home-Cost Squeeze
The LIHEAP delay described above is a federal timing problem, but it sits inside a bigger one for older homeowners: heating is only one of several fixed costs, alongside property tax bills, insurance and basic repairs, that land hardest on a fixed income. Property-tax relief programs in particular run on an opt-in basis; a jurisdiction rarely flags a freeze or exemption a homeowner never applied for.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is an 11-page kit that walks through the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and heating, cooling and home-repair help, alongside an application log and renewal calendar for tracking deadlines season to season.
See the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and the heating and home-repair help laid out in the The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
