What care workers are paid in the UK

Read those four figures together and the shape of care pay is clear. The median care worker in the independent sector was on £12.60 an hour as at December 2025, which is below the £12.71 that became the legal minimum on 1 April 2026. More than half the workforce was therefore paid less than the floor that was about to arrive, which means their rise in April 2026 came from Parliament rather than from their employer.

The bottom tenth is the clearest signal of all. At £12.21 they were on precisely the National Living Wage that applied when the figures were collected. When the lowest-paid tenth of a workforce sits exactly on the legal minimum, the minimum is not a floor beneath the market; it is the market.

The direction of travel is genuine, though. The same median was £7.50 in March 2017 and £12.00 in March 2025. Care pay has risen substantially in cash terms over eight years. It has risen because the legal minimum rose.

Two cautions on reading this. The local authority figure is a mean rather than a median, so it sits higher than it would if the two were measured the same way, and council-employed care roles are a small share of a workforce dominated by independent providers. And the ONS 90th centile of £18.45 is a ceiling: it is what the best-paid tenth of care workers reach, often with unsocial-hours enhancements, seniority or a specialist role behind it, not a rate a care worker can expect to be offered.

The useful span is the one between the bottom and top deciles of employed care workers, £12.21 to £13.91. That is a range of £1.70 an hour covering eighty per cent of the workforce, which is a remarkably narrow band for a job that ranges from companionship to complex clinical support.

An experienced care worker knows how to move somebody safely, spot a urinary tract infection from a change in behaviour, de-escalate distress in advanced dementia and handle a family in crisis. Skills for Care's pay analysis finds that this is worth somewhere between 7p and 10p an hour more than knowing none of it.

The reason is structural rather than anybody's meanness. When most of a sector pays at or near the legal minimum, and the minimum rises every April by more than employers can pass on, the pay of a new starter rises to meet the pay of an experienced colleague. The gap compresses from below. Employers cannot lower the floor, so the ceiling comes down to meet it.

For a carer, the consequence is direct. Staying in an employed care role and getting better at the job does not, on the published evidence, raise your pay by much. If you want your experience to be worth something, it has to be worth something to someone other than an employer paying the going rate, which usually means a different arrangement rather than a different employer.

The NHS Band 2 figure is worth pausing on. From April 2026 it is a flat spot rate of £26,618, which means there is no progression within the band at all: a healthcare assistant on Band 2 earns the same in year ten as in year one unless they move up a band. Band 3 rises from £27,106 to £28,850 after two years and then stops. The pattern is the same one Skills for Care found in the independent sector, written into a national pay structure.

What the NHS gives in exchange is real and should not be waved away: a pension with a large employer contribution, occupational sick pay, paid annual leave, and a structure for moving into nursing or a specialist role. Those are worth money, and a comparison that looks only at the hourly figure is not a fair one.

Helping Hands is the clearer of the two because both halves appear on its own site: families are quoted from £1,675 a week, and employed live-in carers are told they can earn up to £675 a week before tax. The difference covers the office, the matching, the cover rota, training, insurance, and the substantial cost of employing somebody rather than introducing them. Those are real costs and an employed live-in carer gets real things for them, including holiday pay, sick pay and a pension.

Elder advertises up to £865 a week for self-employed live-in carers, which is a different arrangement again and closer to how PrimeCarers works.

For comparison, on PrimeCarers a live-in carer sets their own weekly rate, typically £1,120, and keeps £980 of it after our 12.5% commission. That carer is self-employed, so the same caveats apply as to the Elder figure: no holiday pay, no sick pay, no pension from anyone else, and the tax is yours to pay. What carers earn on PrimeCarers sets our own figures out in full, including what comes out afterwards.

The combination is unusual. There is a severe shortage of carers, turnover is high, and yet pay clusters at the legal minimum. In most labour markets a shortage that acute would push wages up. It does not here because the people buying most of the care are councils working to fixed budgets, and a provider paid a fixed fee cannot bid for staff with money it does not have.

That is also why the private market pays differently. A family arranging and paying for care themselves is not bound by a council fee rate, and what they pay is set between them and the carer. It is a smaller part of the sector, and it is where the pay is.

The point of laying it out this way is that the hourly figures are not comparable on their own. An employed care worker on £12.60 an hour with paid leave, sick pay and a pension is not straightforwardly worse off than a self-employed carer on a higher rate who has to fund all three out of the difference. Whether they are depends on how much of the difference there is and how reliably the work comes.

What the evidence does show clearly is that staying employed in care and getting better at it is unlikely to raise your pay much, because the published gap between an experienced care worker and a new one is a few pence an hour. If that is the situation you are in, the useful question is not which employer to move to but whether a different arrangement would pay you for what you know.

Before making that move, it is worth understanding employment status. It is decided by the facts of the arrangement rather than by what it is called, and getting it wrong has consequences for you and for whoever pays you.