Hourly cost of care at home in the UK: what carers and agencies charge an hour

If you are not sure how many hours to put in, work it out from tasks rather than from a feeling. Forty minutes of washing and dressing plus twenty minutes of breakfast and tablets is an hour every morning, which is seven hours a week. Our guide to how many visits a week your parent needs builds the week from a tick list and hands you the number to bring back here.

Read the chart as a market rather than a price list. There is a thick band in the middle where most carers sit, a tail of newer carers below it, and a smaller group above it: experienced carers, specialists in dementia or complex care, and carers in expensive parts of the country. Families almost always choose from the middle, and the ones who pay at the top are usually buying a particular skill rather than a better carer.

Two things about these numbers matter more than the average. The first is that the rate includes our fee, so it is the figure that leaves your bank account. There is no booking fee, no agency mark-up on top and no minimum term. The second is that the carer sets it. We do not set prices, and a carer who wants more work can charge less than the person on the next street. How our pricing works sets out what is inside the hourly rate.

What an agency sells you is certainty. Somebody will turn up inside the time window, and if that person is ill the agency sends another. That is worth paying for when the care cannot be missed and there is no family nearby. It costs roughly a third to a half more per hour, and it also costs you the choice of who comes through the door. Families tell us the same thing over and over: they did not mind the price so much as never knowing which carer they would get.

Finding a carer yourself is the cheapest option on paper. It also makes you the employer or the client of a self-employed person, with the checks, the insurance, the contract and the cover to sort out. Our guide to what a private carer charges per hour goes through the rates and the responsibilities that come with them.

The council route is not a cheaper version of the same thing. Councils arrange care after a care needs assessment and then charge for it after a financial assessment, so what you pay depends on your income and savings rather than on a rate card. If you have capital above £23,250 in England you will pay the full cost, and many families in that position find a private carer directly. Read how care funding works before you assume you have to pay for everything.

Margaret's week is where most families start. Three mornings of help with washing, breakfast and medication comes to £90 a week, and for a lot of families that one visit settles the thing they were worried about. Derek's week is what happens after a fall: cover at both ends of the day plus a few sleeping nights while confidence comes back, then the nights drop away. Joan and Peter show the other end of the scale, where two people need help and one live-in carer covers both for a single weekly rate.

The difference between the first row and the last one is the part worth pausing on. Hourly visits are good value while the hours are few, and they stop being good value once the hours pile up. Somewhere around 35 hours a week the two lines cross, which is the subject of when live-in care becomes cheaper than hourly visits. If you want to run your own figures against a care home as well, the care cost calculator does the comparison, and the cost of care hub has the same numbers for overnight and live-in care.

The gap between the dearest and the cheapest area on that table is under a pound an hour, and the gap between two carers on the same street is often wider. Carers price against the people they compete with locally, so the London premium families brace themselves for is much smaller here than it is with an agency. What changes more from place to place is choice. In a city you might have thirty carers within a few miles and can be particular about experience, languages and hours. In a rural area you may have three, and the sensible move is to book the one who suits you before somebody else does.

Travel is the other local factor. A carer who drives twenty minutes between calls cannot fit as many visits into a day as one working a single street, and short visits at the far edge of their patch are the ones that get dropped. If you are outside a town, book fewer and longer visits and you will find it easier to keep the same carer.

The one families ask about most is complexity. A carer who can use a hoist, manage a PEG feed or support someone in the later stages of dementia has trained for it and is in demand, and the rate reflects that. It is worth paying, because the alternative is a carer who cannot do the task safely. On the other side, if the visit is company, a meal and a bit of housework, you do not need to pay top of the range, and plenty of warm and capable carers advertise at the bottom of it.

Weekends, evenings and bank holidays are the other question. Some carers charge more for them and some do not, and where they do it is on their profile before you speak to anyone. We have set out how those uplifts usually work in weekend, evening and bank holiday rates. What matters is that you see the rate before you book, rather than finding it on an invoice.

Attendance Allowance is the one to start with, because it is not means-tested and it does not depend on savings. If someone over State Pension age has needed help with things like washing, dressing or being kept safe for six months or more, they may well qualify, and the money is theirs to spend on care. Carers UK and Age UK both run free help with the form, and the form is the hard part.

The council route runs on two separate assessments. The care needs assessment decides what care is needed and is free to anyone who asks for it. The financial assessment decides who pays: in England, capital above £23,250 means you pay the full cost, below it the council contributes on a sliding scale, and the thresholds in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are different. A direct payment lets you take the council's money and choose your own carer with it, which is how a number of families on PrimeCarers pay. The funding guide covers all of it in order.

The saving is not the point on its own. What matters is what the same money buys instead: more hours, or a carer who stays for two years rather than two months. Families who move from an agency to a private carer usually keep the bill the same and add a lunch call, and that extra visit is often what keeps somebody in their own home for another year.