One rule governs all of these: income counts if you can document it and it's reasonably expected to continue for at least three more years. Run each source through that filter and the answers fall out: - Pension: qualifies, since it's expected to continue indefinitely. - Social Security: usable, same reasoning. - Disability: splits by type. Permanent disability qualifies. Temporary disability generally doesn't, because there's no way to document that a temporary benefit lasts three years unless a doctor confirms an indefinite duration in writing. - Child support and alimony: usable when the divorce decree shows the payments continuing more than three years from the date of the loan. That three-year line decides real cases. We had a client whose alimony had about four and a half years left at the time of purchase, so it counted toward qualifying. Had they come back to refinance once the remaining term dropped under three years, the same alimony would no longer have been usable. With any of these, the documentation and the remaining duration matter as much as the dollar amount, and the exact paperwork varies by loan type, so confirm current program requirements.