Self-employed or agency carer: one week of pay side by side

The comparison is closer than the two hourly figures suggest. £20 an hour against £12.71 looks like a large rise, but three things close most of the gap. Our commission of 20% comes out of the rate before you are paid, so £16 of each hour reaches you. The 5 hours of driving are paid on the employed side and unpaid on yours unless a client has agreed to pay for travel. And the employed carer is paid for 5.6 weeks of holiday, so the self-employed carer has to set aside £45.84 from every working week to have the same weeks off on the same money.

The employed side uses the National Living Wage because it is the legal minimum for every hour worked. Skills for Care put the median care worker in the independent sector on £12.60 an hour as at December 2025, before the National Living Wage rose to £12.71 on 1 April 2026, so many care workers are now paid at or close to the minimum. What care workers are paid in the UK sets out the employed pay figures in full, with their sources.

The rate you charge moves the answer more than anything else. The same week at £25 an hour, the top of what carers on PrimeCarers typically advertise, leaves £459.03 a week to spend. At £18 an hour it leaves £348.10, which is less than the employed carer has before you count their sick pay and pension. How much to charge as a self-employed carer works out the rate that leaves you level with an employed wage, and the earnings calculator on carer resources shows what your own hours and rate come to.

The car is the other cost the table leaves out. Travelling between clients is a business expense you can set against your profit for tax. If you use HMRC's simplified expenses, the flat rate on gov.uk for 2026 to 2027 is 55p a mile for the first 10,000 miles and 25p after that; before 6 April 2026 it was 45p for the first 10,000. A client pays you for mileage or travel time only if you agreed it in advance, in writing, with the rate and when it applies, which travel time and mileage for carers covers step by step.

Holiday. Almost all workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, which is 28 days for somebody working five days a week. Bank holidays do not have to be given as paid leave on top. If you work irregular hours or on a zero-hours contract, you build up holiday according to the hours you have worked. Self-employed, a week off is a week without income unless you have put the money by, which is why the worked week sets aside £45.84 from each of 46.4 working weeks.

Sick pay. Statutory Sick Pay is £123.25 a week, or 80% of your normal weekly earnings if that is less, for up to 28 weeks. From 6 April 2026 the three unpaid waiting days were removed and so was the lower earnings limit, so an employee on low or irregular hours now qualifies from the first full day off. You have to be classed as an employee to get it. A self-employed carer who is ill has no sick pay, and a visit you do not work is not paid.

Pension. An employer has to enrol you automatically in a workplace pension if you are a worker aged 22 or over, under State Pension age, and earning at least £10,000 a year. The employer pays at least 3% of your qualifying earnings and you pay the rest of the 8%, unless you opt out. In the worked week that is £9.75 from the employer and £16.24 from you. Self-employed, nobody adds anything. Your State Pension record is still protected: once your profits reach £7,105 a year, Class 2 National Insurance is treated as paid without you paying it.

Travel time. The minimum wage has to be paid for time spent travelling from one work assignment to another, and gov.uk gives a care worker driving between clients as its example. Self-employed people running their own business are not covered by the minimum wage at all, so your rate for the visits has to pay for the driving in between.

Why become a private carer? goes through the rest of what an employer used to sort out and now lands on you, including insurance, records and cover.

1. 1

   Move the tax to a separate account

   £54.36 a week

   Income Tax at 20% above the £12,570 Personal Allowance, and Class 4 National Insurance at 6% on profits between £12,570 and £50,270, spread across a year of working weeks like this one.
2. 2

   Put the holiday money by

   £45.84 a week

   So that 5.6 weeks off pay the same as the 46.4 weeks you work. Take less holiday and you keep more of it; take more and the figure goes up.
3. 3

   Build a reserve for sickness and gaps

   Your choice

   There is no set figure, because nobody knows how often they will be ill or how long a client will be in hospital. Holding a few weeks of spending money back gives you room before you rely on private work alone.
4. 4

   Decide what to put into a pension

   Your choice

   Nothing is added by anyone else. Matching what the employer paid in the worked week, £9.75, would come out of what you have to spend.

On the employed side, PAYE takes £40.62 of Income Tax and £16.23 of National Insurance from the £444.85 week before it is paid, and the employee does nothing. On the self-employed side, nothing is deducted, so the whole £480 arrives and looks like yours. You register for Self Assessment with HMRC by 5 October after the end of the tax year in which you started, file a return, and pay the bill by 31 January. How to pay tax as a self-employed carer walks through registering, the return and every way to pay.

Your costs come off your profit before any of this is worked out, so the tax figure above is the most you would pay on this week, not the least. Mileage between clients, your phone, protective clothing and training you pay for are the usual ones for a carer, and allowable expenses for self-employed carers lists what HMRC accepts. If you live in Scotland, Scottish Income Tax has different bands, so the Income Tax part of the figure will differ; National Insurance is the same across the UK.

Employment status is decided by how the work is done, not by what anyone calls it. On gov.uk's list, somebody is probably self-employed if they quote for work, are not directly supervised, invoice for what they have done and pay their own tax and National Insurance. On PrimeCarers you set your rate, choose your clients and decide how you work, and you are responsible for your own tax. That independence is what makes the arrangement self-employment, and it is also why nobody else fills your diary or covers your absences.

Finding clients is the part that takes longest. Families search, read profiles and choose, so a new profile may take time to fill a week, and some carers build up private work alongside a job before giving it up. Finding private clients covers what families look at and where the work is, and the struggles of working in care covers zero-hours contracts and the parts of the job that wear carers down in either arrangement.

If you decide to try it, you can register as a carer on PrimeCarers and set your own rate, or see the carer jobs open near you first to judge how much work there is where you live. Registering is free, and before families can see your profile PrimeCarers checks your identity and right to work, and that you hold an enhanced DBS check issued within the last 18 months, alongside a recorded online interview. What carers earn on PrimeCarers sets out our commission in full and what reaches you from each kind of booking.