LIHEAP in August: which states are open, and which quietly shut

If you are searching for LIHEAP in August, the answer depends entirely on where you live, and not in the way a single national page would suggest. LIHEAP has no national season. Every state sets its own calendar, splits the year into its own components, and opens and closes each one on its own dates.

Two assumptions are easy to make about a federally funded program and wrong in specific states. The first is that you apply in the autumn. The second is that crisis help is available all year. Both hold somewhere and fail somewhere else.

Seven pages were read for this article, covering four states and the federal office, all on the verification date at the top. The four states gave four different answers. In two of them a household could apply that week. In one the calendar said open while the application form said closed. In one the window had already shut, days after it opened.

Four states, four calendars

Oklahoma’s summer window opened and shut in the same week

Oklahoma’s LIHEAP page lists the anticipated opening dates for the current federal fiscal year. Winter heating on January 6, 2026, the Energy Crisis Assistance Program on April 14, 2026, and summer cooling on July 14, 2026. Beside that list it says each program remains open until funds are expended, and it gives no closing date for any of them.

The closing date is on the page. It is at the very bottom, under a heading marked Broadcast Message, below the contact details and the weatherization section. It says the agency will stop accepting summer cooling applications at the close of business on Friday, July 17, 2026, and that households which already applied can still send in their verification documents.

So the window opened on a Tuesday and shut at the end of that same week. It ran for four days. The opening dates and the closing date are on one page, several screens apart, and only the opening dates are in the section that looks like a schedule.

The page also tells you how to check whether enrollment is open, and that instruction is the part that fails. It says to visit the state’s benefits portal, where a red banner reading “Apply for Energy Assistance” is displayed during open enrollment. The link it gives for that portal does not go to the portal. It goes to a Wayback Machine capture of the portal taken on March 5, 2026. A reader who follows it lands on a frozen copy from the spring, where no live banner can appear at all.

Reached at its own address, the portal’s home page carried no such banner when this was checked, which agrees with the broadcast message rather than with the enrollment list.

The announcement that opened the window is worth reading beside it. It sets the maximum monthly gross income at $1,696 for one person, $3,483 for a household of four and $5,867 for a household of eight. It says that once the funding is exhausted the remaining applications must be denied, and that summer cooling is not an emergency program, so a cut-off notice buys no priority in the queue.

Oklahoma’s crisis provision has two parts, and compressing them into one is a mistake. The Energy Crisis Assistance Program is a scheduled component with its own opening date, April 14, 2026. Separately from it, life-threatening crisis assistance runs all year and is reached by telephone rather than through the portal.

Louisiana’s season is open and its front door is not

Louisiana shows how far a calendar and an application route can drift apart.

The Louisiana Housing Corporation publishes three windows. Heating from December 15 to March 31. Cooling from April 13 to September 30. Crisis from October 1 to September 30, which is to say all year.

At the top of the same page sits the other half of the story. The cooling season is open, and online applications are closed. The page states that it hosts the only statewide Louisiana LIHEAP online portal, that applications completed through that portal are processed for payment between May 1, 2026 and July 15, 2026, and that local agencies continue normal intake from April 13, 2026 to September 30, 2026 or until funds are exhausted. Crisis applications are not taken online at all.

So Louisiana in August is open through parish community action agencies and shut through the internet. A household that reads “the cooling season is open” and goes looking for a form finds the form switched off. The route that still works runs through the local agency for the parish, and the page carries the list of them.

The income test is stated as 60% of estimated state median income, with the 2026 dollars printed beside it: $30,618 for a single-person household, $58,882 for a household of four, $81,257 for a household of eight. The page adds that all benefits are subject to eligibility and funding, and that availability is not guaranteed.

Virginia is taking applications, until August 15

Virginia’s Energy Assistance Program has four components, three of which carry an application window on the page. Fuel assistance runs from the second Tuesday in October to the second Friday in November. Cooling assistance runs from June 15 to August 15. Crisis assistance runs from November 1 to March 15 for equipment and security deposits, with fuel and utility bill help from January to March 15. The fourth component, weatherization, is run by a different agency and no window is published for it.

Cooling is the one open in August. It can cover the purchase and installation of a window air conditioner, repair of central air conditioning or a heat pump, and help with electric bills or deposits. Income is measured as gross monthly income at or below 150% of the federal poverty level.

Virginia’s cooling component also applies a test that the other three states do not apply to theirs. The household must include someone aged 60 or older, someone living with a disability, or a child under six. A household with none of those three does not qualify for cooling help in Virginia at any income.

Then there is the crisis component, and it is the thing worth carrying away from this page. Virginia’s crisis assistance is defined entirely around heating. Its eligibility test is a heating emergency: no heat, a cut-off notice, unsafe equipment. Its windows run from November to March. There is no cooling equivalent anywhere on the page.

So a Virginia household at risk of losing its electricity during an August heatwave has no crisis door in this program. It has the cooling window, and only until August 15.

Pennsylvania closed in May, and half its page has not caught up

Pennsylvania states in two places that the 2025-2026 LIHEAP season is now closed. Once as a banner at the top, and once as the entire content of the section headed “How to apply”. Both of those are current.

The rest of the page is not. The introduction still tells readers that from December 3, 2025 to May 8, 2026 they can apply for a cash grant of $200 to $1,000. The questions further down answer “when are applications open” with the same finished window, in the present tense. The income table is stamped effective February 1, 2026, which is to say it changed partway through a season that has since ended.

That mixture is worth carrying as a reading habit. The parts of a program page that get updated are the banner and the apply button. The explanatory prose and the questions underneath are where a closed program keeps sounding open, and they are the parts a search result is most likely to drop you into.

Pennsylvania also settles the crisis question in the opposite direction from Louisiana. Its own answer covers cash grants and crisis grants together, in one window, so crisis there is not a year-round backstop. It closed on May 8, 2026 with everything else.

Income is published as flat annual dollars with no percentage attached: $23,940 for one person, $49,500 for a household of four, and $8,520 for each additional person.

The income test is not one test

Two of the four publish a rule, two publish a table, and none of them gives you a number you can carry across a state line. Whether the two dollar tables are themselves a federal percentage worked out in advance is not something either page says, and no equivalence between them is claimed here.

The federal page cannot answer this

The Health and Human Services page for LIHEAP is where a search for the program name tends to land. It describes what the program does, warns that LIHEAP makes no grants directly to individuals and charges no fee for a benefit, and hands the reader on to a referral site and the National Energy Assistance Referral hotline.

What it does not carry is a status board. Nothing at the federal level lists which states are taking applications this week. The office publishes a great deal about the program, including state and tribal plans, eligibility criteria, grant recipient deadlines and a data dashboard for the current fiscal year, and none of that answers the question a household in August is actually asking.

The page also carries its own date. It states that it is current as of May 7, 2025, which is before every window in the table above opened or closed.

That is less a fault in the page than a description of how the program is built. The federal office funds it and its own page says it exists to explain how grant recipients administer LIHEAP. The grant recipients are the states, and the calendar, the components, the income test and the closing date all belong to them.

The same pattern runs through the equipment money. A separate look at the federal credits found that every one a homeowner could use for energy work has now ended, which pushes more households toward state-administered programs, and state-administered programs are the ones with no national page to check.

It also runs the other way. An approved LIHEAP application is itself worth something at the other agency: two of the three states checked for the comparison with the federal appliance rebates accept a LIHEAP benefit letter in place of an income calculation, and neither the federal LIHEAP page nor any of the four state pages above mentions that.

What to do with this

1. Read the whole state page, including the bottom. Oklahoma published its closing date in a broadcast message under the contact details, a long way below the enrollment list carrying the opening dates. Anyone who stopped reading at the list would have concluded the window was still open.
2. Check the application route separately from the calendar. Louisiana’s season and Louisiana’s online form disagree with each other right now, and the season is the half that gets quoted elsewhere.
3. Read the component names before you read any date. Heating, cooling and crisis are separate programs with separate windows in all four states here, and “LIHEAP is closed” often means that one of the three is.
4. Do not assume the crisis component runs all year. Louisiana’s does, and Oklahoma’s life-threatening track does. Pennsylvania’s closes with the season. Virginia’s runs in winter and does not cover cooling at all.
5. Treat a link on a government page as a claim like any other. Oklahoma’s instruction for checking whether enrollment is open points at an archived copy of the page you are being told to check.

Where each state stands as it gets checked is recorded on Is it open in my state?. The income rules for the federally funded equipment rebates are a separate question with a separate state-by-state answer. If your state told you something that contradicts what is here, especially if you were turned away after reading that you qualified, write in. A correction is the most useful thing this site can receive.

What is not confirmed here

• The other forty-six states, the District of Columbia, the territories and the tribal programs. Four state pages were read for this article. They show that the calendars do not agree with each other, and they cannot tell you what yours says.
• Whether the dollar tables and the percentage rules are the same rule. Virginia and Louisiana name a percentage. Pennsylvania and Oklahoma publish dollars without naming one. Whether those tables are a federal percentage worked out in advance was not established from the pages read, so no comparison between the four is offered beyond how each one is written.
• Whether the money behind the open windows is still there. Louisiana’s page says availability is not guaranteed and that local intake runs to September 30, 2026 or until funds are exhausted. Oklahoma’s says applications must be denied once funding is exhausted. Neither state publishes a running balance, so an open calendar is the most that any page here can verify.
• Why Oklahoma’s portal link is archived. The link on the program page resolves to a Wayback Machine capture rather than to the live portal. Whether that is deliberate was not established, and the live portal is reachable at its own address.
• The federal income ceiling in statute. The rule setting the outer limit on what a state may adopt was not read at its source, so no federal ceiling is asserted above. Two federal pages that state it returned no readable text when fetched for this article.
• Weatherization and equipment replacement. All four states run components beyond bill payment, including equipment repair and efficiency work. Only the bill assistance windows were checked here.