What Is an IPP? How Your Child's Regional Center Plan Works

An IPP, or Individual Program Plan, is the written plan that decides what your Regional Center pays for. Regional Centers fund services for Californians with developmental disabilities, at any age. The IPP lists your child's goals and every service, with who provides it, how much, and how often.

If a service isn't written into the IPP, nobody is paying for it, whatever was said at the meeting.

What's in an IPP?

An IPP is really two documents: the plan itself, and a signature form that lists every service. Since 2025, every Regional Center in California has used the same state form for new plans.

The plan describes your child and where things are headed:

• About your child. What people like about them, what's going well, and how they communicate.
• A vision for the future. What your child and your family want, soon and years from now.
• Life areas. A section for each part of life the plan works on, like supports at home, relationships, safety, or getting around.
• An emergency plan. What to do, and who to reach, if something goes wrong.

Each life area answers the same five questions:

1. What outcome do you want?
2. What is happening now?
3. What is important to your child?
4. What is important for your child?
5. What needs to be done?

"Important to" is what your child cares about, like the same cereal every morning or a favorite bus route. "Important for" is what keeps them healthy and safe. A plan with only one of the two is half a plan.

Every service the Regional Center pays for has to sit under a life area, tied to an outcome. That rule is why a request with a clear goal gets written in, and "we need more help" doesn't.

The signature form turns all of it into a table. Each service gets a line: who provides it, the start and end dates, how much, and how often. Services someone else pays for, like the school district or your health plan, go in a second table.

Check the "supported by" box on every line. If it says "provider to be determined," the service is approved and nobody is doing it yet. New services often take a while to start, because the Regional Center has to line up a provider. If you already have one in mind, say so.

You get a copy of the plan, by email or in the mail, in the language you prefer.

IPP vs. IEP: what's the difference?

Because two different agencies pay for them, the IPP and the IEP cover different parts of your child's life. The IEP, or Individualized Education Program, is the school district's plan for special education. The IPP is the Regional Center's plan for help at home and in the community.

Plenty of kids have both plans, with a different agency paying for each. By law, the Regional Center can't pay for anything that's the school's job. So bring the IEP to your IPP meeting. It shows what the school already covers, and those services go in the IPP's second table. Our IEP vs IPP side-by-side goes item by item, from the classroom aide to respite.

Two more plans get mixed up with the IPP. Before age 3, the Regional Center's plan is called an IFSP, an Individualized Family Service Plan. And each provider writes an ISP, its own plan for working on your IPP goals.

What happens at an IPP meeting?

An IPP meeting is where you and your service coordinator write or update the plan together. Your service coordinator is the person at the Regional Center who manages your child's services.

You can bring anyone: a partner, a grandparent, a friend who takes good notes, a provider, an advocate. It's your child's plan, so your child can join too, for all of it or just a part. The meeting can happen at the Regional Center, at home, or by video, at a time that works for you.

Expect questions more than paperwork. What's going well, what's hard, what your child wants next. Most Regional Centers type the plan up after the meeting. Before you leave, you get the list of services everyone agreed to.

Your rights at the meeting:

• You can ask for an IPP meeting any time, and it has to happen within 30 days.
• Someone who can approve services has to be there. If nobody is, the Regional Center has to hold another meeting within 15 days.
• You don't have to sign at the table. Nothing new starts until you sign, so take it home and read it.
• You can sign the parts you agree with and not the rest. The parts you sign can start right away.
• If the team can't agree on a service, you can hold a second meeting within 15 days.
• You can ask for a different service coordinator.
• You can get the plan, and every letter about it, in your own language.

Service coordinators sometimes say they just need a signature today to get things moving. "I'd like a few days to read it before I sign" is a complete sentence.

Be careful with that signature. Sign a plan that cuts a service, or says no to one you asked for, and the state counts that as agreeing. Then no Notice of Action comes, and that's the letter that lets you appeal.

To get ready, the state has free workbooks that walk you through the plan's questions before the meeting. There's one for ages 3 to 13, one for ages 14 to 22, and one for adults. Disability Rights California's IPP guide explains your rights in more detail and has a planner you can fill in.

How do I add a service like adaptive skills training to the IPP?

Ask your service coordinator in writing to add the service to the IPP, and don't wait for your next scheduled meeting. Your Regional Center has 30 days from your request to hold an IPP meeting about it.

Then make the request fit the form. Three of its five questions do the work, so answer them in this order:

1. What is happening now. "Mornings take 90 minutes and end with everyone upset."
2. The outcome you want. "Gets through the morning routine in 30 minutes, with two reminders or fewer."
3. What needs to be done. "Adaptive skills training at home, on the morning routine." That's the Regional Center's name for one-on-one teaching of everyday skills.

Put that way, your service coordinator has three boxes filled in. "We need more help" fills none of them.

For adaptive skills training, the whole request can be one email. Send it to your service coordinator and copy the provider:

Can't find their address? Search your inbox for @nlacrc.org, @westsiderc.org, or @elarc.org. For a different provider, put their name in and copy them instead. Our guide to getting adaptive skills training from your Regional Center walks through what happens after you hit send.

Approval only puts the outcome on paper. Someone still has to teach the routine at home, one step at a time, the same way every morning, for weeks.

That teaching is the part we'd take on. Your child would work with a caring professional who has a master's degree and 9.3 years of experience on average. The match comes from their track record: they've already helped people stuck on that same routine. Your family pays $0 through your Regional Center. See which skills adaptive skills training could take on first.

What to ask for at your IPP meeting

Six services are worth raising at almost every IPP meeting. Nobody at the table reads you this list, so walk in with it. Ask about each one out loud, and have the answer written into the plan, even when it's "not right now."

What if the Regional Center says no?

When the Regional Center says no, get it in writing before you sign anything. Say this at the table, politely, and let them type it:

Please write in the plan that I asked for it and it was declined, and send me a Notice of Action.

On the signature form, that's two boxes. Tick "Agreement on some or no services" and name the service. Then tick "I request a Notice of Action."

A Notice of Action is the letter that explains the no and how to appeal it. It's due within 5 business days of the decision. As of September 2026, you have 60 days from the day you get it to appeal to the state.

If the no cuts a service you already have, move faster. Appeal within 30 days, before the change starts, and the service stays in place while you appeal.

The appeal form lets you pick one step, or more than one:

An appeal has to finish within 90 days unless someone asks for more time. And if a decision is just taking too long, you can treat the delay as a no and appeal that.

Help is free. Every Regional Center has a clients' rights advocate, whose job is helping you with this. Disability Rights California helps families with Regional Center appeals too. The state's appeals guide has the form and every deadline.

Questions parents actually ask