California EVV Requirements 2026: A Guide for Home Care Agencies

This is the thing to understand before anything else, and it explains why California EVV advice you find online so often seems to contradict itself.

There is not one California EVV system. There are two, run by two different state departments, and which one you use depends on how the caregiver is employed and paid rather than on what service is being delivered.

• CalEVV, administered by the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), for providers employed by an agency.
• IHSS EVV, administered by the Department of Social Services (CDSS), for individual providers in the self-directed model who are paid directly by the state.

Someone searching for California EVV help will hit both, and the instructions are entirely different. If you have ever read a guide telling you to use the Electronic Services Portal and wondered why it bore no resemblance to your situation, this is why.

Two questions settle it.

Does your agency employ the caregiver? If your agency hires, schedules and pays the caregiver, you are in CalEVV territory. This covers personal care services agencies and home health agencies, and it includes WPCS providers who are employed by an agency.

Is the caregiver paid directly by the state? Individual IHSS and WPCS providers following the self-directed model, who receive payment directly from the state, do not submit EVV data using CalEVV. They comply with IHSS EVV requirements published by CDSS and submit through the IHSS EVV Mobile Application, the IHSS Electronic Services Portal, or the IHSS Telephone Timesheet System.

The rest of this page is about CalEVV, because that is the one that applies to agencies. If you are an individual provider rather than an agency, the CDSS pages linked at the end are where you should be.

One practical consequence worth naming: California's largest home care program by participant numbers is IHSS, and a large share of it runs through individual providers rather than agencies. That means a lot of the California home care conversation is about a system your agency will never touch.

CalEVV is the state-supplied EVV system. Sandata Technologies is the contracted vendor operating it for DHCS, and providers can use it free of charge.

That last point deserves emphasis because it is routinely obscured by vendors selling into California: there is a compliant option that costs you nothing. Any claim that California compliance requires buying software is false.

Providers affected by the requirement must be registered, trained, and using either CalEVV or an Alternate EVV system, and must collect and report all six of the data elements the Cures Act requires.

California operates an open model. Instead of CalEVV you may use what the state calls an Alternate EVV system, usually written AltEVV, so long as it meets state and federal EVV requirements.

The process, as DHCS describes it, runs roughly like this:

1. The provider registers and advises DHCS of the vendor they have selected
2. The provider and the vendor are acknowledged and advised of next steps, including training
3. The vendor must successfully complete testing with Sandata Technologies to send EVV data to the CalEVV Aggregator

The testing requirement is the part to focus on when evaluating any vendor. A system that has not completed testing with Sandata cannot deliver your data, whatever its marketing says. Ask directly whether they are already transmitting to the CalEVV Aggregator for other California agencies today, and how long onboarding took for those agencies.

California's arrangement here is closer to Florida's open vendor model than to Texas's formal proprietary approval, though every state words this differently. The concept is covered generally in our open versus closed models explainer.

Both routes converge. The CalEVV Aggregator is the central data repository, operated by Sandata for DHCS, that receives visit data from CalEVV and from every Alternate EVV system.

So choosing your own software changes where visits are captured, not whether they reach the state. This is the same structure described in our aggregators explainer, and it is worth understanding because most EVV payment problems come from data failing to arrive or failing to match a claim rather than from visits going unrecorded.

The federal requirement covers Medicaid-funded personal care services and home health care services delivered in the home. California implemented this in phases, with Phase II extending the requirement to home health care services and to personal care services beyond the self-directed IHSS population handled in the earlier phase.

For an agency, the practical answer is that if you deliver Medi-Cal funded personal care or home health services in a client's home using caregivers you employ, EVV applies to those visits and CalEVV or an approved AltEVV system is how you meet it.

As everywhere, the requirement follows Medi-Cal funding. Private pay visits are not covered by the federal EVV requirement, though many California agencies run both and end up tracking two sets of hours in two places.

For the Phase II population:

• Personal care services: 1 January 2022
• Home health care services: 1 January 2023

The personal care date sits two years after the federal deadline of 1 January 2020, which is a wider gap than most states. The home health date matches the federal one exactly. Both are in the past, so the question in California is not whether the requirement has arrived but whether your visits are reaching the aggregator.

Our Cures Act page explains why state dates and federal dates diverge.

California does not publish a quarterly scoring system the way Texas does. What DHCS does publish is a list of remedies available to it where a provider fails to comply with established requirements. DHCS and its partners may:

• Provide technical assistance on compliance
• Require an approved corrective action plan
• Recover associated overpayments
• Impose enrollment or monetary sanctions
• Take any other remedial action deemed appropriate

Recovery of overpayments is the one with the sharpest teeth for a small agency, because it reaches backwards into visits you have already been paid for and already spent the money on.

1. Confirm which system applies. Agency-employed caregivers mean CalEVV. Individual state-paid providers mean the CDSS IHSS route.
2. Decide between CalEVV and AltEVV. CalEVV is free and requires no vendor testing. Only go the AltEVV route if you have a reason beyond preference.
3. Register and complete training. Affected providers must be registered, trained, and actively using their chosen system.
4. If using AltEVV, confirm testing is complete before you rely on it, not after. Get it in writing from the vendor.
5. Check your data is arriving. Reaching the CalEVV Aggregator is the part that actually matters for your claims.

Points we could not establish clearly enough from an official source to publish. DHCS can answer all of them at EVV@dhcs.ca.gov:

• Exact Phase I dates and scope. We can confirm the Phase II dates above. The earlier phase covering the self-directed IHSS and WPCS population is described by CDSS, and we did not verify its dates well enough to state them.
• The precise list of covered services and waiver programs. California has several waiver programs delivering in-home care, and which specific services fall inside the requirement is a question for DHCS or your managed care plan rather than for us.
• Whether any AltEVV testing costs fall on the provider. We found the testing requirement but not a statement about who bears any associated cost.
• Managed care plan variations. Much Medi-Cal care is delivered through managed care plans, and whether individual plans add requirements on top of the state baseline is worth asking each plan directly.

• DHCS California EVV: the state EVV page, which carries current registration steps and CalEVV resources
• DHCS EVV email: EVV@dhcs.ca.gov
• CDSS IHSS EVV, if you are an individual provider rather than an agency: IHSS EVV help
• Your Medi-Cal managed care plans, individually, for anything they require beyond the state baseline