What should a home care agency charge for private-pay visits?

Home care agencies charge private clients roughly £26 to £38 an hour in the UK, $30 to $40 in the US and A$80 to A$95 on a weekday in Australia. Against carer wages of £13, $17 and A$35, those look like enormous margins, and they are not.

The gap is almost entirely paid time that is not billed time. An hour of care is not an hour of work, and in domiciliary care the difference is bigger than in any comparable trade: travel between calls, handover, notes, on-call cover and the visits that get cancelled on the doorstep. Agencies that price against the wage rather than against the loaded cost per contact hour can grow every year and end up with nothing.

Figures below were read in October 2026 and are dated and attributed where they come from a published source. They describe advertised rates and published cost models, not a survey.

What do home care agencies actually charge?

Two of those numbers carry real authority and are worth taking seriously.

The Homecare Association's Minimum Price for Homecare for England in 2026/27 is £34.42 an hour, up from £32.14 the year before. That is not a market price. It is a cost model: what a provider needs to charge to pay the National Living Wage, meet employer National Insurance, and run a compliant service with a small surplus. Published private rates sit below it far more often than they sit above it.

In the US, the CareScout Cost of Care survey published in March 2026 puts the 2025 national median for a non-medical in-home caregiver at $35 an hour, up 3% on $34 the year before. CareScout now reports homemaker and home health aide as one category because the two prices have converged. Regional spread is wide, from around $24 in the lowest-cost states to the mid-$40s in the Pacific Northwest.

What does an hour of care actually cost you?

Start with a UK carer paid £13.00 an hour, comfortably above the £12.71 National Living Wage that applies from 6 April 2026.

Now the number that matters, which is not the wage. A carer working 8:00 to 16:00 does perhaps ten calls. Six of those eight paid hours are contact time. The other two are travel between clients and writing notes, and both are working time you must pay for.

An hour you sell for £34 costs about £31.56, a margin of 8%. At £30 it is a 5% loss. At £28 it is a 13% loss, and selling more of it makes the hole deeper rather than shallower.

That lands close to the Homecare Association's £34.42 by a cruder route, which is a reasonable check on both. Theirs is the more thorough model and worth reading instead of this one if you are setting prices for real. Treat the National Insurance line as a method rather than a current figure: thresholds move, and the Employment Allowance changes it for smaller employers.

The US version, for a caregiver on $17.21 an hour, the BLS median for home health and personal care aides in May 2025, at 8 paid hours for every 6.5 billed:

Here is the thing that catches people out. At $35 an hour, the gross margin is 30.9%, which is exactly the 30 to 40% the industry quotes and genuinely is what you earn after wages, payroll taxes and workers' comp. The net margin after everything else is 4.5%. That is not a contradiction. It is why the reported median net margin for a home care agency is around 9.7% while everybody talks about 35%.

If you remember one thing from this page: the 30 to 40% figure is not profit, and it was never profit. It is the money you have left to run the agency with.

Why is the funded rate below your cost?

Because it has been for years, and the gap is now documented rather than suspected.

The average council fee rate for homecare in England for 2026/27 is around £25.37 an hour, against the £34.42 the Homecare Association says delivery costs. Against the cost model above, £25.37 is a 24% loss on every hour. The Homecare Association puts the resulting national shortfall at roughly £2.3 billion.

Three consequences, all of them pricing decisions rather than political ones.

Your private clients are subsidising your funded work. If you do both, your private rate is covering the hole in the other half of the book, and agencies that price private work off the council rate plus a bit have usually not noticed.

A funded-heavy book cannot be fixed by growing. Volume multiplies a loss. The only levers are the mix, the rate negotiation, and the cost per contact hour.

Private-only agencies have more room than they think. You are competing against providers whose published rate is depressed by a contract you do not have.

Why is a 30-minute visit not half of an hour's work?

Because the travel and the notes do not halve with it.

Take a call with 12 minutes of travel and 3 minutes of notes attached to it:

A 30-minute call costs you half as much again per contact hour as an hourly one. If you charge a flat hourly rate pro rata, every short visit on your rota is sold below cost, and the more popular your short-call service is the worse your year gets.

Two fixes, and most agencies need both. Set a minimum visit length and publish it. And price short calls per visit rather than per hour, so a 30-minute call is 60 to 70% of your hourly rate rather than 50%.

The same arithmetic is why clustering calls by area beats filling the rota in the order enquiries arrive. Shaving four minutes off the average journey moves your margin more than a rate rise you have to justify to every client.

What should you charge for nights, weekends and bank holidays?

More, and the multiples are already set for you by what the market will bear.

One Australian provider's published 2026 price list runs A$85 on a weekday, A$116 on a Saturday, A$143 on a Sunday and A$173 on a public holiday. As multiples of the weekday rate that is 1.36x, 1.68x and 2.04x. Those are useful anchors anywhere, because the underlying driver, premium pay for unsocial hours, is the same everywhere even where the law differs.

Nights need their own answer, and in the UK it is a legal one. In Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8 the Supreme Court held that a worker on a sleep-in shift is owed the minimum wage only for the hours they are awake and working, not for the whole shift. That makes a sleep-in and a waking night two products with two cost bases, and two lines on your rate card. Sell them at one price and you are either overcharging for one or losing money on the other.

Take advice on your own arrangements before relying on that. Whether a shift is genuinely a sleep-in turns on the facts, and a shift described as a sleep-in that is really a waking night is a minimum wage problem rather than a pricing one.

How should you price live-in care?

Live-in is where the home care market splits into two business models, and choosing between them is a bigger decision than the rate.

Fully managed. You employ the carer, you are regulated, you arrange cover when they are ill, and you carry the care plan. UK published weekly prices run roughly £1,100 to £1,800, with one provider quoting £1,603 including holiday cover and travel.

Introductory. You introduce a self-employed carer to the household, the family contracts with the carer directly, and you charge a weekly management fee or a one-off introduction fee. UK weekly totals run roughly £800 to £1,400. One published example is £1,092 a week of which £252 is the agency fee, so the agency takes 23% of the weekly cost, plus a £250 one-off registration fee. Others charge a recruitment fee of around 12.5% of the weekly cost.

Managed care in those examples is about 47% dearer to the family than introductory, and it earns it: cover, supervision, regulatory responsibility and somebody to complain to.

The introductory model is worth understanding even if you do not run it, because it is a placement business wearing home care's clothes. The economics are a placement agency's rather than a care provider's: a fee against an introduction, a guarantee period you are liable for, and a replacement you do for nothing if it fails early. If that is your model, the arithmetic that matters is in our post on what nanny agencies charge in the UK, which covers placement fees, minimums and the cost of a guarantee in detail, and applies almost unchanged.

Be clear with yourself about which one you are. The commonest expensive mistake here is an agency that calls itself introductory, charges an introductory fee, and then supervises, rotas and covers like a managed service. That is a managed service priced as an introduction, and it is a regulatory question as well as a pricing one.

When should you raise your prices?

Three triggers, in the order they arrive.

The wage floor moved and your rate did not. This is the one that quietly kills home care providers. Minimum wage increases are announced months ahead and land on a known date. If your rates move afterwards, or not at all, every uprating takes a permanent slice. Raise in the same month, every time, and say why.

You are turning work away, or your carers are fully booked. Capacity is the cheapest reason to raise prices, because the demand is already proven.

You cannot recruit at the wage you pay. If you are losing carers to the supermarket, your pay is the problem and your pay is a function of your rate. Agencies spend years on retention schemes before trying price.

What does not work is raising quietly and hoping. Home care clients are long-term, often elderly and frequently anxious about cost. An increase you can explain in a sentence, usually a wage rise you are passing on, is accepted far more often than people expect. One you cannot explain costs you the client and the referral behind them.

What this means for how you run it

Two numbers decide whether a home care agency works, and neither is your hourly rate.

Contact hours divided by paid hours. Your real capacity, set by routing, call lengths and cancellations. Improve this before you touch pricing, because it costs a client nothing.

Fully loaded cost per contact hour. Not the wage. The wage plus travel, holiday, employer taxes, mileage and everything in the tables above, recalculated whenever a wage floor or a tax threshold moves.

Both are arithmetic over things you already know: who went where, for how long, what was actually worked against what was scheduled, and what was invoiced. The difficulty is never the sum. It is that the visits live in a rota, the travel lives in a mileage claim, the pay lives in a payroll system and the invoices live somewhere else, so nobody puts them side by side.

That is the job home care agency software is actually for. For what it is worth: Rostavo records scheduled and clocked hours as separate figures so the difference between them is visible, and exports both to whatever you run payroll in. It does not run your payroll and it does not do funder billing or electronic visit verification, so if you bill Medicaid or a local authority you need a regulated platform as well as or instead of us. Our honest comparison of the options says which.

Rates, wage floors, employment taxes and minimum wage rules vary by country and change. The Homecare Association minimum price, the CareScout survey and the Mencap judgment are named above so you can check them at source. Nothing here is legal, tax or regulatory advice; sleep-in arrangements and worker status in particular need advice on your own facts. If your numbers differ from these, we would like to hear it: hello@rostavo.com.