Basic standing says you count, unconditionally and equally. On its own, that is just a sentence. The floor is what turns it into a life: a home you can live in, food on the table, a way to get around. Once the floor is defined, it is exactly what basic standing provides. It is part of the standing guarantee, the material condition beside the legal, informational, and civic ones.
A standard, not a sum
The floor is defined by what it must do, not by an amount of money:
- What a home must do. Safety, privacy, rest, sanitation, a fixed address, and enough room for the household to live without crowding.
- Sized to the household. One standard for each household size, adjusted only for need, such as a disability or care, never for status or worth.
- Within reach. Close to the person’s relationships, care, and community. The floor never includes a claim on the scarcest places: reach is a right, a view of the ocean is not.
- Priced at what it costs to provide there, now. Because it is a standard rather than a sum, the floor rises on its own as machines make building cheap.
That settles the extremes. A tiny studio is too low if it fails the functions. An apartment in the most expensive district is too high, because most of its price is location. The floor is whatever meets the functions, near your life, at the cost of building it.
Measured like a cost-of-living index
The floor is a time series, measured the way employment or prices are measured: a published method, regular data, and revisions on a schedule. Several independent bodies each publish their own estimate for each region. The figure actually paid is set by a rule fixed in advance, the median of their estimates, and every estimate and the spread between them are published beside it. No single body controls the floor, and when one estimate drifts, everyone can see it.
This refines a rule the framework applies to all measurement. No single number may judge a person or a place. An operative figure may price a standard.
Delivered as monthly credits
Everyone receives the floor as credits every month, like a pension that starts at birth. Credits keep the floor flexible. One person lives small near the sea, another roomy inland, wherever their credits make it affordable. No office assigns anyone a home, so support never becomes management. How the floor is paid for is in where the money comes from.
- Credits are money. They can be saved and spent on anything.
- They cannot be taken. They are never seized, never made conditional, and never reduced by what a person earns.
- They cannot be signed away. Credits cannot be sold or pledged as collateral, so no lender can buy someone’s next five years.
- They follow the person. Two parts are indexed, by coarse region: housing, and mobility, which costs most where transit is thin and a car is how people reach work. Food and the rest are the same everywhere. Because the indexing is coarse, most moves change nothing and a false address gains little. When someone moves, the credit moves with them: resource portability built in. How the guarantee itself is protected, and how it can still be corrected, is set out in the constitutional layer.
The credit carries no activity test. Rest, grief, study, caring for someone, or simply not knowing what comes next never cost a person the floor.
What stays in kind
A few goods cannot work as credits. A good stays pooled and guaranteed in kind when one person cannot insure it alone, when it must not vary with where someone lives or what they can pay, or when without it a person cannot use their other rights. Five goods pass that test:
- Healthcare. One serious illness outruns any monthly credit.
- Formation. Education and development from early childhood, to the same standard everywhere.
- Legal identity and access to justice, including an independent advocate in high-consequence decisions.
- Basic communication. Being reachable and connected.
- Public safety and emergency relief. A disaster hits a whole region at once.
Everything else, including housing, food, clothing, mobility, and leisure, comes as credits. Mobility is priced as what reaching work and services takes in that kind of place: a transit pass where transit serves, a basic car where it does not.
The supply half
Credits only work if there are floor-standard homes to spend them on. Where homes are short, landlords raise rents until the credits are gone. So the floor has a second half, an obligation that the homes exist.
Most floor housing is built and rented in the ordinary way, paid through credits. The same bodies that measure the floor also publish a supply gap: where the credit index rises faster than the cost of building, homes are short. When a gap opens, a public builder of last resort builds floor-standard homes in that region and rents or sells them at cost. Credits are what make that work. Because they cannot be seized, stopped, or reduced, they give a public builder a rent stream it can borrow against cheaply, so floor homes can cover their costs at the credit’s housing amount where a private builder could not. No zoning or land rule may block floor housing within reach. A rule that does is manufactured scarcity, and the floor overrides it.
Nothing to lie about
The credit is paid on facts that are hard to fake and need no one watching a home: being a person, being an adult or a child, and a documented need. It never depends on who lives with whom.
| Case | Credit |
|---|---|
| One adult | the single-adult floor, enough to live alone |
| A couple moves in together | each keeps a full individual credit |
| A child | the child’s own credit, paid to whoever raises them, set at the measured cost of adding a child to a floor home |
| Ten children | each child’s own credit, with no cap |
| A grandfather moves in | his own adult credit comes with him, plus a care adjustment if he needs care |
A couple gets more than two people sharing a home strictly need, and that is deliberate. If moving in together cut the credit, people would hide their relationships, and someone would have to check. Worse, a person in a bad relationship could not afford to leave. Every adult’s credit must cover living alone at the floor, because leaving must never cost a person their viability.
A child’s credit covers what a child costs, not more, so no one profits from having children. The tenth child has the same standing as the first, so there is no cap; the amount falls only as the measured cost falls. Neglect is a matter for child protection, never for the credit.
Addresses. Food and the rest of the credit are the same everywhere; housing and mobility follow the region. A person with several homes names one primary residence, where they actually live most of the year, and second homes change nothing. The declaration is checked only against records that already exist for other reasons: where the person rents or owns, where their children are enrolled, where they use healthcare. The regional uplift, the amount above the cheapest region’s rate, is paid only against evidence of housing there: a lease, ownership, or a host’s declaration. A host who makes that declaration shares responsibility for a false claim. A review happens only when those point to a cheaper region than the one declared and the gap is large. A false claim is corrected from then on, and the overpayment is repaid from income above the floor, interest-free, waiting until there is such income; the credit itself is never seized or reduced (when people cheat). Someone who moves often, or has no home at all, still receives the full credit, with the housing and mobility parts following the region they are mostly in, or the regional median when there is none.
Only the need adjustments, for disability or care, are ever checked. The care adjustment belongs to the person who needs care, who decides who receives it: family, a paid caregiver, or no one. Everything else is universal, because checking who deserves a cheap good can cost more than the good. Paying every adult the single-person rate costs more than a household system would. The difference buys three things: no surveillance of private life, no penalty for relationships, and a real ability to leave.
What the floor is not
The floor is not a basic income dropped into an unchanged system, where the money passes through people to whoever holds the homes and the credit (a payment is not a floor). The floor is not a comfortable allowance that leaves people fed and irrelevant. It sits beneath everything else standing protects: civic continuity, jurisdiction over one’s own life, and continued access to the places where life happens. A floor that kept people alive while closing their future would fail the guarantee it belongs to.
It is also not the ceiling. Above it, everything is contribution: what people earn by doing what others value, starting things, caring, and answering for decisions. The floor exists so that contribution rewards what people value, instead of being the price of staying alive.
How a society gets from today’s patchwork to a full floor, starting with what already exists and rising as the automation return grows, is worked out in the standing transition.