The Medical Assistance Transportation Program in Philadelphia moves seniors to Medicaid-covered care at no cost, and age is not the test. Here is who qualifies.
By Philly Senior Advisor Care Team — Benefits & Costs Team · October 26, 2026
Ask around a waiting room at Jefferson or Temple and you will hear the same sentence from a dozen adult children: "We already tried the senior ride program, and they said no." Nine times out of ten, what they tried was the wrong program. Greater Philadelphia has two completely separate publicly funded ride systems that serve older adults, they are funded from different pots of money, they answer to different agencies, and they have almost nothing in common except that a van shows up at the curb. The Medical Assistance Transportation Program in Philadelphia gives seniors enrolled in Medical Assistance a way to reach Medicaid-covered care at no cost, and it is the one families overlook most often because the words "senior" and "age 65" appear nowhere in its eligibility rules. The other, SEPTA's Shared-Ride program, is subsidized by the Pennsylvania Lottery, is built specifically around riders 65 and older, and will take a person almost anywhere — the grocery store, a daughter's house in Roxborough, a hair appointment — but is not designed around medical necessity and is not free.
That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the two programs fail in opposite directions. A 68-year-old in Mayfair with Medical Assistance who calls Shared-Ride for a three-times-a-week dialysis run will be quoted a fare and a trip limit she cannot sustain on a fixed income, when the same trips would have been covered in full by MATP. Meanwhile, an 80-year-old in Chestnut Hill with Medicare and a comfortable pension who calls MATP for a ride to the pharmacy will be told she does not qualify at all, because MATP eligibility runs through Medicaid enrollment, not age. Families routinely conclude "there is no help" after one phone call to the wrong number. Before anyone writes a check for private non-emergency medical transport at $60 to $120 a round trip, it is worth ten minutes to figure out which door your parent is actually standing in front of.
MATP is a Pennsylvania Department of Human Services program, funded by the state and run county by county, and its eligibility test has exactly two parts: the rider is enrolled in Medical Assistance (Medicaid), and the rider has an unmet transportation need for a service that Medical Assistance covers. That is the whole gate. There is no age minimum, no disability determination, no asset review separate from the Medicaid determination the person already passed, and no requirement that a doctor write a prescription for transportation. For an older adult in Greater Philadelphia, this usually means MATP opens up at the same moment something else does — when a Community HealthChoices application is approved, when SSI eligibility brings Medical Assistance with it, or when a spend-down for long-term care finally clears at the County Assistance Office. Many families get the Medicaid approval letter, file it, and never learn that the same card unlocks free rides to every doctor, dentist, psychiatrist, lab, hospital test, dialysis chair, and durable medical equipment supplier on the Medicaid side of the ledger.
Registration is straightforward and deliberately forgiving. A caregiver calls the county MATP office with the rider's ACCESS card number and a description of what the person needs — a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, a walker on board, an individual rather than a shared ride, an escort — and rides can begin while the paperwork is still moving, as long as the county office receives the signed application form within 30 days of eligibility being verified. Once a person is registered, that registration lasts as long as the Medical Assistance coverage lasts, though the county may ask periodically for updated information. One practical warning for Philadelphia families: because MATP is administered locally, a move across a county line — a parent leaving a Southwest Philadelphia rowhouse for a daughter's place in Media — means re-registering with a different county program, not a simple address change.
The single most common source of frustration with MATP is the expectation that it means a door-to-door van. By design, the program is required to arrange the least costly appropriate mode of transportation, and a van is usually the most expensive option on the menu. If the rider can manage a bus or the Market-Frankford Line and lives near a route, MATP may provide transit passes or tokens or reimburse fares. If a family member is already doing the driving, MATP can reimburse mileage at a set per-mile rate along with parking and tolls — the per-mile figure has historically been far below the federal business rate, so confirm the current amount with your county program before counting on it, and expect to submit a monthly log of trips rather than getting paid per ride. Only when there is no car in the household and no usable transit connection does the program move to shared-ride vans, taxis, or wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
Two rules inside that structure are worth knowing before the first call, because they are the ones families most often have to assert. First, the default pickup is at the curb, not at the front door; door-to-door assistance is required when a medically verified disability or limitation keeps the rider from reaching the curb on their own, which is precisely the situation in a Fishtown or Point Breeze rowhouse with four marble steps and no railing. Say that plainly at registration and get the limitation documented. Second, an escort rides at no cost when the person cannot travel independently because of age, disability, or a language barrier, or when an escort is otherwise verified as necessary — which means a daughter or a home care aide can usually ride along with a parent who has moderate dementia instead of sending them into a shared van alone. Neither accommodation is granted automatically. Both are granted when someone asks and the file supports it.
Because MATP is county-administered, there is no single Greater Philadelphia number, and this is where searches for free medical transportation for seniors in Philadelphia tend to dead-end. Philadelphia is a consolidated city-county — the city and the county are the same government, merged in 1854 — so a Philadelphia resident deals with one city-level MATP program rather than a city office and a separate county office. In the collar counties, MATP is typically delivered through the same nonprofit shared-ride operator that runs county paratransit: Bucks County Transport in Bucks County, TransNet in Montgomery County, Community Transit in Delaware County, and Rover Community Transportation in Chester County. The practical effect is that a Doylestown family and an Upper Darby family follow the same state rules through two different organizations with different booking windows, different call-center hours, and different levels of patience about same-day changes.
Phone numbers and contracted brokers in this program do change — Pennsylvania has repeatedly revisited whether MATP should be run county by county or through a statewide broker — so rather than trusting a number copied off an old flyer, start from the Department of Human Services MATP page on pa.gov and use its county contact finder for the current office. If you are already working with a Community HealthChoices care manager, the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, Montgomery County Aging and Adult Services, the Bucks County Area Agency on Aging, Delaware County's Office of Services for the Aging, or Chester County Department of Aging Services, ask them to make the warm handoff; they place these calls weekly and generally know which operator is currently answering. As a rule, build the ride into the appointment-making habit: book the medical appointment, then book the trip in the same sitting, because most county programs want advance notice measured in business days and some fit riders onto fixed group routes that only run certain days to certain hospital corridors.
MATP is not the only thing that moves an older adult around Greater Philadelphia, and knowing the boundaries prevents both double-booking and gaps. Community HealthChoices, Pennsylvania's mandatory managed-care Medicaid program for long-term services and supports, is administered through DHS's Office of Long-Term Living and delivered by CHC managed-care organizations, and those plans arrange non-emergency medical transportation for their participants as well — so a CHC enrollee may be routed through the plan rather than the county MATP office, and the care manager is the right person to ask which applies. LIFE, Pennsylvania's version of the National PACE model and the program Philadelphians know through providers like LIFE Philadelphia, is different again: it is an all-inclusive program that provides its own transportation to and from its centers and to medical appointments as part of the package, so a LIFE enrollee generally does not need MATP at all. None of these is PA's PACE or PACENET, which are prescription-drug subsidy programs for older Pennsylvanians and have nothing to do with rides or placement.
Then there is the Pennsylvania Department of Aging's OPTIONS Program, the Lottery-funded care management and in-home services program delivered through the county Area Agencies on Aging on a sliding fee scale with no Medicaid-level spend-down. OPTIONS is a third, separate system — it is not CHC and it is not LIFE — and for an older adult with too much income for Medical Assistance but no money for private aides, an OPTIONS care manager is often the person who assembles a workable transportation plan out of SEPTA Shared-Ride trips, a volunteer driver program, and a senior center's own van. Finally, remember what SEPTA Shared-Ride does that MATP never will: non-medical trips. Groceries, bank, church, a grandchild's school play, an older adult center lunch. For most Greater Philadelphia families, the durable answer is both programs running in parallel — MATP for anything Medicaid pays for, Shared-Ride for everything else.
Transportation problems are usually logistics problems, not legal ones, and most are solved by calling the county MATP office and asking for a supervisor the same day. Keep a short log: date, appointment time, who you spoke to, what you were told. If a complaint to the county program does not resolve things, the complaint can be escalated to the Department of Human Services. If MATP formally denies, reduces, or terminates service, that decision comes with a written notice stating the reason and explaining appeal rights, and the rider can request a Fair Hearing before an Administrative Law Judge. One deadline is worth circling: if the appeal is filed within 10 days of the notice, existing services generally continue while the appeal is pending, which can matter enormously for someone mid-course in dialysis or radiation.
There is also a quieter failure mode families should watch for in a residential setting. When a parent lives in a Pennsylvania Personal Care Home licensed under 55 Pa. Code Chapter 2600 or an Assisted Living Residence under Chapter 2800, transportation to medical appointments is often something the facility arranges or charges for, and the admission agreement should say exactly which trips are included in the rate and which are billed as an extra. Compare that against what MATP would cover for a Medical Assistance enrollee before accepting a per-trip charge on the monthly statement. For nursing home residents, transportation sits inside a different framework entirely — nursing homes are licensed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health under 28 Pa. Code Chapter 211 with CMS certification, and medical transport is generally part of what the facility coordinates. And if a resident's ride needs are being ignored to the point that care is suffering, the Pennsylvania State Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, housed within the Pennsylvania Department of Aging, takes exactly that kind of complaint.
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Philly Senior Advisor