Hiring your own caregiver in Florida

What Florida calls it

Consumer-Directed Care Plus (CDC+). This matters more than it sounds. State agencies rarely use the phrase “self-direction” on the phone, and the national directories list the waiver that funds it rather than the mechanism itself. If you ring Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD) and ask about self-direction you may be told they do not have it. Ask for Consumer-Directed Care Plus and you will get somewhere.

Under this model you hire, train and supervise the support staff yourself, rather than receiving whoever an agency assigns.

Can a relative be paid?

Yes, with conditions. This is the question most families are actually asking, and in Florida the answer is yes.

Family members and friends can be paid employees under CDC+ for services that do not require a licensed professional — personal care, respite, transportation and similar. APD's own guidance sets three conditions worth knowing before you plan around it. Background screening and training are required, though APD notes the training is not the same as under the waiver program. Family members must meet the requirements in APD's service codes chart for whichever service they will provide. And a family member cannot serve as the consumer's CDC+ representative if that same person is going to provide services — the representative role and the paid-provider role cannot be held by one relative. One specific limit APD calls out: a parent can provide companion services under CDC+, but not under the flexible benefit service.

How the money works

We could not confirm this from published materials — ask when you call.

On controlling the budget: You decide how the budget is spent across services, not only who is hired.

The waiting list

Florida calls this pre-enrollment rather than a waiting list, and the terminology matters when you ring: ask about "pre-enrollment" for the iBudget waiver. Priority is set under Section 393.065(5), Florida Statutes, using APD's published Pre-enrollment Priority Categories and a Prioritization Tool that decides who gets an offer when funding becomes available. APD's own instruction if circumstances change is direct — if there has been a change in circumstance, or you are in immediate need of services, contact your local APD regional office and ask to speak to your assigned worker. Losing a caregiver is a change in circumstance; say so explicitly.

Programs that qualify

2 Florida programs in our data offer self-direction to people with intellectual or developmental disabilities:

• Consumer-Directed Care Plus (CDC+)
  Serves: Adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities; Children with intellectual or developmental disabilities
  Official program page ↗
• Developmental Disabilities Individual Budgeting (iBudget) Waiver
  Serves: Adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities; Children with intellectual or developmental disabilities
  Official program page ↗

Eligibility runs through the state’s developmental disability determination, not through an autism diagnosis. Autism usually qualifies, but not automatically — some states apply an IQ threshold or require that the disability began before a particular age. That determination is the first gate, before any of the above.

CDC+ is an option inside the iBudget waiver rather than a separate program, so the first question is whether the person is enrolled in iBudget at all — CDC+ cannot be used without it. The number below is the CDC+ helpline; for eligibility and pre-enrollment you want your APD regional office instead.

What to say when you call

Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD): (866) 761-7043 — and the sentence that gets you to the right person is roughly: “I want to ask about Consumer-Directed Care Plus for a family member with a developmental disability.”

Four things worth asking in the same call, because they decide everything else:

• Is my family member eligible for Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD) services at all? Everything else depends on this.
• Where does the waiting list stand, and is there a shorter route? Several states run a lower-support waiver specifically for people already waiting.
• Can a relative be paid, and under which service code? Agencies answer this precisely when you ask for the code.
• Do I get budget authority as well as employer authority? Those are the terms they will recognize.

Everything on this page comes from Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD)’s own published material, read on 2026-09-18, and is listed in the sources below. Where we could not confirm something we have said so rather than filling the gap — programs change, and a confident wrong answer about who can be paid is worse than an honest one.