In 2016, Andrews and Sellers studied the coefficients in the \((1-q)\) -expansion of F(q), known as the Fishburn numbers, and established several congruences modulo primes. Motivated by their work, there has been considerable interest in extending these congruences to similar expansions of q-hypergeometric series within the Habiro ring that satisfy so-called “strange” identities. In this work, we establish a general result on prime-power congruences for coefficients arising from certain expansions of non-Habiro ring elements that also satisfy strange identities. As applications, we consider two such non-Habiro elements previously studied by Andrews et al. (Duke Math J 108(3):395–419, 2001), and show that the appropriately normalized coefficients in their expansions obey prime-power congruences.
