What carers are paid in 2026, and why it matters to you

Most of the other guides on caring for a parent are about the day-to-day of arranging care. This one looks at what sits underneath it: what a carer is paid, and why that matters beyond the cost of a visit.

About 1.6 million people work in adult social care in England, and the workforce has grown for three years running. Turnover has been falling too: 23.1% of the workforce left their post in 2024/25, around 335,000 people, the lowest rate for several years, and the vacancy rate has fallen to 7% of posts from a peak of about 10.5% in 2021/22.

Pay plays a part in that. Skills for Care's own analysis of its pay data found that carers paid close to the average rate for their local authority area had a turnover rate of 23.6%, against 28.1% for carers paid furthest below it. A carer paid fairly for the area is more likely to still be working there next year, which matters if your parent has come to know and trust a particular person. The same carer every visit sets out why that continuity is worth asking for directly.

Whether enough people choose care work over the next fifteen years, as the number needing it grows, depends in part on what it pays.

From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour, up from £12.21 the year before. It applies to almost every worker in the country, including care workers employed by an agency or a council. Full current rates are on gov.uk.

Skills for Care tracks pay across the independent care sector separately. Its most recent count, taken in December 2025, put median care worker pay at £12.60 an hour, only 11p below the National Living Wage due to arrive four months later, and pay has been compressing toward that incoming floor rather than moving away from it.

That compression has a consequence each April: 90% of providers had to raise at least some of their staff's pay just to stay legal when the new rate arrived, because so much of the workforce was already sitting close to the old one.

The Homecare Association, the trade body for home care providers, calculates a Minimum Price for Homecare each year: what a provider needs to charge to pay a carer at least the National Living Wage, cover employment costs such as National Insurance and travel time, and still run a viable business. For 2026/27 it put that figure at £34.42 an hour, up from £32.14 the year before.

That gap, £9.37 on every hour of commissioned care, is why a pay rise cannot simply be found inside a council contract: the rate a council pays sets a hard limit on what a provider can pay the carer doing the visit, however much the work is worth.

Care providers registered with the Care Quality Commission could sponsor carers from overseas once care work became eligible, and many did: the number of staff of non-British, non-EU nationality working in the sector rose by around 300,000 between March 2022 and 2025/26, to an estimated 430,000, according to Skills for Care.

None of this closes the route overnight, and it says nothing about carers already living and working in the UK, whatever their nationality. It does mean the workforce will need to grow chiefly through people already here from 2028 onward. Full details on gov.uk, and what this means for the wider care sector is worth reading for the fuller picture.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 creates this Social Care Negotiating Body: a form of national collective bargaining for the whole sector. Sector bodies including the Homecare Association have said the funding allocated for that first agreement will not close the gap described above on its own, and what the agreement will cover has not yet been decided.

Carers on PrimeCarers are self-employed. They set their own hourly rate based on their experience and local demand, and you agree it with them directly rather than through a third party. Most charge £18 to £25 an hour with our fee included, above the National Living Wage floor described earlier, because the rate reflects what the carer decides their time is worth rather than a council contract or an agency's margin.

A traditional home care agency typically charges £28 to £35 an hour for the same visit. Some of that difference is the office costs and management layers an agency carries, which a carer pricing their own visit does not have to fund. Private carers against agency carers sets out that comparison in full, and what carers and agencies charge per hour has the fuller breakdown of current rates.

A very low rate is not necessarily a bargain: it can mean a carer new to the work, or one who has not checked what similar carers nearby charge. Ask directly about experience and rate, in the same way you would check their availability near you, rather than choosing on price alone.