How to price a live-in day: the arithmetic nobody teaches

Setting your rate is the highest-leverage skill in self-employed care, and it is the one nobody teaches. Most carers work it out alone, usually halfway through a phone call with a client listening. This is the arithmetic, in the order it actually needs doing.

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The rate you set once is the rate you keep

A carer with years of agency live-in work behind her rang us, upset. She had been used to around £350 a day in her old job, she told us, and her profile with us said £148. It had said £148 for a long time. She had put a number in when she registered, treated it as a placeholder, and never gone back to it.

“I don’t know how to change it online.”

A rate you cannot find is a rate you cannot raise.

Another carer called after discovering that the friend who had recommended us to her was earning roughly double her own usual rate for similar work.

“For the same job, the difference was twice. She’s been paid twice what I’m normally paid.”

The friend was not a better carer. She had set a different number. Your rate is not a suggestion from us and it is not a market average. It is your price, and nobody is going to raise it on your behalf.

What a live-in day rate is actually paying for

A live-in day rate is not payment for twenty-four hours of work. It pays for a day of living in someone’s home: several hours of active support across the waking day, a defined break, and a night you are expected to sleep through, getting up once or twice if needed. Our guide to how many hours a live-in carer works sets out the shape of that day. It is why an hourly carer can look at a fair live-in rate and feel insulted by it.

The divide-by-twenty-four test

Dividing is not how the rate is built, but it is still worth doing, because it tells you when a rate has drifted somewhere indefensible. One carer did the sum on a call with us, looking at what a prospective client’s existing round-the-clock carer was on.

“That’s really low, to provide care in this day and age. That’s under the national minimum wage.”

Nobody had set out to underpay anyone. The figure had been agreed years earlier and never revisited, and nobody had done the division. She worked out a fairer day rate and took it to her interview.

In 2026, live-in carers booked through the platform are typically on roughly £130 to £190 a day, and private hourly carers on £18 to £25 an hour. Agencies commonly charge families from about £239 a day for live-in and £25 to £35 an hour for visits, though what reaches the carer out of that is a different figure. If your live-in rate sits under that range, ask what it is about this job that makes it worth less than the going rate. Often the answer is nothing.

Price the night you will actually have

Every live-in job is described before it starts, and the description is usually honest. It is also a snapshot, taken by people used to their own normal.

A live-in carer told us she had gone almost three weeks without proper sleep. Her client had come home from hospital needing attention through the night, and she was getting a few hours of relief a week. The job she had priced was not the job she was doing.

“I’ve been a carer for many, many years, and I need to know what is going on.”

Before you agree a rate, ask about the night in specifics rather than adjectives:

• How many times was your relative up in the night last week? Not usually. Last week.
• What has changed recently? A hospital stay, a new diagnosis or a fall all reshape nights.
• Who else is in the house overnight, and what do they do?
• What happens on the nights when it goes wrong, and how often is that?

If the honest answer is more than a couple of brief wakings, you are not being asked for a sleeping night. You are being asked for a waking night inside a live-in booking, and it needs pricing, or staffing, differently. Our piece on sleeping nights versus waking nights is worth sending to a family who is unsure which they are asking for. And being in the house is not the same as being off duty, the subject of downtime is not free time.

Charge for the night, not for each disturbance

A carer starting with a couple, one of them with advancing dementia and confused at night, wanted to get the pricing right in both directions. Their previous carer had charged extra for every disturbed night, and it had left them anxious about calling for help.

“I don’t want him to have a bad taste about live-in carers.”

Her answer is worth copying. She agreed a flat rate for a trial of a few weeks, said openly that she would revisit it once she knew what the nights were like, and did. Charging by the incident turns every bad night into an argument. A review date turns it into one conversation, with evidence.

Two people is more work, even when the hours look identical

A couple in one house looks, on paper, like one placement. In practice it is two sets of medication times, two routines, two sleep patterns and two moods, and the hard part is the moment when both need you at once. The hours are the same. The work is not.

Families broadly accept this. Our page for clients explains why live-in care costs more for couples, so you are not asking for anything strange. What you are not doing is charging twice: the cooking, the household and simply being there are shared. An uplift on your single-person rate is the normal shape, and its size depends on whether the second person needs hands-on personal care or mainly company.

The same logic covers physical complexity. A carer new to us was offered a placement supporting a larger client who needed hoisting and full washing support, and nearly quoted her usual rate. Work that needs equipment, technique and a strong back shortens a career, and it belongs in the price. So do specialist skills: moving and handling, catheter care, stoma care, feeding tubes. A qualified nurse who took an overnight, bedbound case told us afterwards that her rate did not reflect the clinical skill involved. The time to say that is before you accept.

Do the travel maths before the hourly maths

A carer who had gone quiet on us explained why: the invitations she kept getting were single one-hour visits, and the driving swallowed them.

“If it’s just one hour every day, it’s really hard.”

She was being numerate. An hour of pay against a forty-minute drive each way, plus fuel, is nearer two and a half hours of your day for one hour of income.

Live-in work hides the same sum somewhere less obvious: the journey to and from the placement. A rotation of two weeks on and two off means a travel day at each end that nobody pays for, and a placement several hours away is a repeating cost. Our page on whether live-in carers get paid for travel covers what is normal to ask for. Work out the door-to-door hours and the fuel first, then look at the fee.

Declining work that does not add up is not a black mark. Knowing what a carer will not take is how we stop sending the wrong jobs. If your invitations are consistently unsuitable, tighten your availability and travel preferences rather than going quiet, which is the theme of registered for years, never booked.

One more cost. Work booked through PrimeCarers is covered by PrimeCarers’ insurance; work you arrange privately, outside the platform, is not, so you need your own public liability cover for that. Car insurance is separate: business use, and hire and reward cover if you charge a client for mileage.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

Know what lands in your bank, not what you quoted

A qualified nurse took her first booking with us and saw close to £100 deducted in commission. Nobody, she said, had explained that when she signed up on a friend’s recommendation.

“I feel like it’s a betrayal.”

She deserved a clearer explanation up front. The remedy is easy to describe and easy to skip: commission applies to work booked through the platform, and it is not the same for every kind of booking. Live-in work, hourly visits and longer shifts are treated differently, so check the current rate in the carer help pages before you accept, not after your first invoice. It changes the number you should be quoting.

Then work backwards, in this order:

1. Decide the weekly figure you need to take home. Start from your bills, not from last year’s pay.
2. Add commission at the tier that applies to that type of booking.
3. Add the tax and National Insurance you will owe, and set a fixed share of every payment aside the day it arrives. Our guide on how to pay tax as a self-employed carer explains how much.
4. Add travel: the fuel, and the unpaid days at each end of a rotation.
5. Divide by the days you will realistically work in a year, not by 365. Gaps between placements, illness and time at home are unpaid.

That is what we did with the carer at the top of this article. Working from what she needed rather than a number she had guessed years earlier, she reached a day rate that got her to roughly £1,000 a week in her hand. We agreed a one-off rate with her existing client and sent her the link to update her profile. Getting paid on time is a separate skill, covered in the week your money doesn’t come.

What to do next

1. Open your profile today and look at your day rate. If you cannot remember setting it, it is out of date. If you cannot find where to change it, ask us.
2. Write down the weekly take-home you need, then work backwards through commission, tax, travel and unpaid weeks to reach a day rate. Round up rather than down.
3. Before you accept a live-in job, ask the four night questions above, and check the commission tier for that booking type in the carer help pages.
4. For couples, hoisting or clinical work, quote an uplift and say plainly what it is for. Families accept a reason more readily than a bare number.
5. Agree a review date at the start of every placement, in writing. It turns raising your rate later into a diary entry instead of a confrontation.

Related reading

• Sleeping night, waking night, and the forty minutes that doubles the bill
• Downtime is not free time: what live-in care asks of a carer
• The week your money doesn’t come: a payment checklist
• Carer salary report: what the highest earners do differently
• How to find a live-in care job