Many social assistance programmes make no explicit provision for displaced people at all. Although refugees have more often been considered in terms of international protection, this has not been the case as regularly for internally displaced people (IDPs). As crises become more prolonged, international support is also likely to decline. Whenever displaced people are included, they are usually considered in terms of the reach or impact of social assistance programmes but are rarely consulted about the design of such programmes. This is often due to political barriers around exclusion by host governments. This paper does not tackle these political barriers but sets out to partially address the exclusion of displaced people from the design and planning of social assistance programming by consulting them in a range of design choices about how they engage with social assistance and what a good social assistance programme would look like. The paper draws on research in two locations (camp and city) in each of three countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lebanon, and Pakistan. Each of these countries has hosted large numbers of displaced people for extensive periods of time but they are otherwise very different contexts. This is therefore a ‘most different’ comparative research design, so common factors across the three countries are particularly important.