Clearfield is one of the more affordable places to grow old in Davis County, a working-class city shaped by the rail yards and Hill Air Force Base, and that budget reality is part of why Medicaid comes up here. The city's Medicaid-accepting senior living centers on a single large campus, Chancellor Gardens on 1500 East, which carries both assisted living and memory care behind one address rather than spreading the choice across several smaller homes.
Families in Clearfield usually arrive at the Medicaid question the same way: a fixed income that covered private-pay care for a while, then stopped keeping up. The New Choices Waiver is Utah's route for picking up the care costs of assisted living or memory care once a resident qualifies, and in a city where budgets are already tight, it is often the difference between a local move and no move at all.
Assisted Living and Memory Care Behind One Clearfield Address
Chancellor Gardens runs large for Davis County, around 150 beds on its 1500 East campus, with a secured memory care wing of roughly 30 rooms set apart from the assisted-living side. Assisted living here means help with the daily tasks a resident can no longer manage alone, bathing, dressing, medications, and meals, while the memory care wing adds locked-unit security and closer supervision for residents living with dementia. The New Choices Waiver, Utah's single path for Medicaid into these two care types, funds the care work in either wing for a resident who meets a nursing-home level of need.
A larger campus changes what Medicaid looks like day to day: there is more staff on a shift and a wider activity calendar than a small home can run, but waiver-funded rooms on a campus this size are usually a limited share of the total, and often shared rooms that hold the resident's out-of-pocket housing cost down. Whether the campus can take a new waiver-funded resident in a given month is its own question, separate from whether the waiver applies, and it is worth pinning down before counting on a bed. Day-to-day care stays the same no matter who pays; what the payment source changes is the room arrangement and how much of the monthly bill lands on the family.
Why Clearfield Sits at the Affordable End, and What Medicaid Adds
Clearfield sits toward the affordable end of Davis County's senior-living market. Private-pay assisted living at a campus like Chancellor Gardens generally runs around $5,050 a month, near Utah's statewide median, which national cost surveys place in the mid-$5,000s and below the national figure near $5,900, and memory care with its secured staffing costs more still. The listed starting rate at the campus, posted around $5,050, lands at the lower end of the care levels, so a family should read it as a starting point that climbs with the level of care a resident needs.
For a qualifying resident, Medicaid through the New Choices Waiver pays the care-services side of that bill, which is the bulk of it. The housing-and-meals share, what the program calls room and board, stays with the resident and comes out of monthly income. Utah's 2026 limits put a single applicant's income ceiling at $2,982 a month and countable assets at $2,000, with a 5-year look at past transfers. A skilled-nursing stay is funded through traditional Medicaid instead, room and board included. Independent living gets nothing from Medicaid, since the program is built around a care need that independent living does not involve.
A Younger City, an Older Need, One Waiver Campus
Clearfield runs younger than Davis County overall, with around 2,900 of its roughly 32,000 residents past 65, close to one in eleven, a smaller senior share than the county's older bench towns. Most of the city's senior-living demand still routes through private-pay buildings, so the Medicaid-accepting share is narrow, and at a single campus the waiver-funded rooms are narrower still. The New Choices Waiver is capped across Utah, which means qualifying for it and finding an open waiver-funded room are two different things. In a one-campus city, that second step is where families spend their time, and where current, on-the-ground information matters most.
The Pull to Keep Care in Clearfield
For a Clearfield family, the case for keeping a Medicaid move in town rests on a few ordinary things. Work in Clearfield has long meant Hill Air Force Base or the Freeport Center, and the people who built a life around them tend to have family still close, a familiar congregation, and doctors at Holy Cross Hospital - Davis a few minutes up Antelope Drive. A waiver-funded room at Chancellor Gardens keeps that web intact, where a move away to chase an open bed would cut most of it. There is also the matter of cost of living: Clearfield is one of the more affordable corners of the county, and staying local often means a smaller room-and-board bill than a pricier suburb would carry, which matters when room and board is the part Medicaid does not pay.
Pinning Down a Waiver Bed at Chancellor Gardens
Because Clearfield's Medicaid-accepting care runs through one campus, an advisor's work is specific rather than broad. The first thing to confirm is the live one: whether Chancellor Gardens has room for a new waiver-funded resident at the moment, in assisted living or in the locked memory care wing, and how long the wait runs if it does not. From there it is a matter of matching the resident to the right wing and lining up the New Choices application so eligibility and an open room arrive close together.
On a discharge from Holy Cross Hospital - Davis or McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden, that timing gets tight, since the waiver can take weeks to approve while a hospital bed clears in days. An advisor who tracks the Clearfield campus can run the paperwork and the room search in parallel and flag early if the family should be ready with a short private-pay bridge. We keep vetting and adding Clearfield communities to the directory through 2026. Start the conversation about paying for senior care in Clearfield with Medicaid, or see the communities we've reviewed when the time is right.
