Glossary
Budget Category
Also called: spending plan category
Last reviewed September 30, 2026
The one-sentence answer
One of the three groups every SDP service belongs to — Living Arrangement, Employment and Community Participation, or Health and Safety.
What this means for you
Your spending plan totals up in three buckets. Every service code sits in one of them, so every plan shows a subtotal per category and then a grand total.
| Category | Codes | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Living Arrangement | 310–321 | Respite, homemaker, housing access, community living supports |
| Employment and Community Participation | 331–340 | Community integration, employment support, transportation, training, independent facilitator |
| Health and Safety | 356–378 | Therapies, nursing, behavioral services, equipment, dental, vision |
You are not locked into how you split them. This is the part families most often don't know: you may move money between service codes and between budget categories at any time during your budget year, with regional center or IPP team approval.
If your son's respite needs drop in March and his transportation needs rise, you do not wait for the next budget year. You revise the plan.
And when you do, your FMS has to be told quickly. The regional center must notify your FMS provider of a spending plan change within three business days. If your FMS seems unaware of a change you made, that is a specific obligation you can point to.
What does not change is the total. Moving money between categories is free. Exceeding the certified individual budget is not — the difference can never be negative.
For the detail-oriented
The categories come from the DDS Service Codes by Budget Category table, dated 14 February 2019. Current operative guidance on how budgets and plans are built is DDS Directive D-2025-Self-Determination Program-003 (25 November 2025), Initial Individual Budgets and Spending Plans.
Two things worth knowing about the ranges as they appear on official forms:
- Regional center spending plan templates often print the categories as 310–330, 331–355 and 356–399. Those are the historic range labels with headroom built in. The codes that actually exist run 310–321, 331–340 and 356–378.
- There is no code 332, and Living Arrangement jumps from 321 to 331. Both gaps are real.
Who approves what: the regional center certifies the spending plan before it starts. DDS does not approve individual budgets or spending plans, and says so explicitly — even the reporting requirement for large increases is a monitoring mechanism rather than an approval gate.