Service Code

The one-sentence answer

A three-digit number that tells the regional center and your Financial Management Service what kind of service each line of your spending plan is paying for.

What this means for you

Every line in your spending plan carries one. Respite is 310. A music therapy class is 331. Mileage is 338. An independent facilitator is 340. The code is how the money gets categorized, tracked and billed.

There are 42 of them, grouped into three budget categories:

Category	Codes
Living Arrangement	310–321
Employment and Community Participation	331–340
Health and Safety	356–378

The same code can appear many times. Four different support workers at four different rates are four separate lines, all under 320. That is normal and correct — do not try to combine them.

The name on the code is not always the name of the thing. The clearest example is 378, which the waiver calls Family Support Services and the DDS code list calls Child Day Care Facility. Same service, two official names. See Family Support Services.

Mileage has its own code. Reimbursing a worker for driving bills under 338, separately from the code that pays their hourly wage. It comes out of a different line of your plan.

For the detail-oriented

Source: the DDS Self-Determination Program Service Codes by Budget Category, dated 14 February 2019, cross-checked against Appendix C of the CMS-approved waiver CA.1166.R01.00.

Three quirks in the numbering that are real, not typos:

• There is no code 332. The Employment and Community Participation block runs 331, 333, 334 — the gap is genuine.
• Living Arrangement jumps from 321 to 331. Also genuine.
• The Health and Safety block is labeled 356–399 but stops at 378. There are no codes 379 through 399. That range label is headroom, not a list. It means the block contains 23 codes, not 44 — and anyone describing "the 356–399 services" as though there were forty-four of them has misread the table.

Codes 315, 316 and 317 are the FMS codes — Bill Payer, Co-Employer and Sole Employer. They describe your financial management arrangement rather than a service you buy, and since 1 July 2022 the regional center pays that fee outside your budget. So they should not normally appear as a cost in your spending plan. Many plans list one at zero for reference, which is a sensible way to record it.

Do not confuse 315/316/317 with 490/491. Those are the Financial Management Services codes for the HCBS Waiver Participant-Directed Services program, which is a different program from SDP.

The code list is dated 2019 and the codes themselves appear stable. For what is fundable rather than what it is called, the July 2024 goods and services guidance is the more current authority.