What is changing in home care, and where to look first

If you are looking for practical help instead of reading further, the guides on this site are organised by the kind of care you need. Start with home care or what care costs.

Carers on PrimeCarers set their own rate, typically £18 to £25 an hour with our fee included, against £28 to £35 an hour through an agency that employs the carer directly. The gap exists because an agency's rate also covers its own overheads and a margin, not only the visit itself.

The wider adult social care workforce in England has been easing rather than tightening. None of that means care is easy to find everywhere. A rural postcode or an unusual shift pattern can still mean a longer search. The current state of private carer pay looks at what carers themselves are charging and why, in more detail than the figures here can show.

There is a third option besides PrimeCarers and an agency: hiring somebody directly, with no platform or agency in between, which typically costs £16 to £18 an hour. It can look like the cheapest route on paper, and sometimes it is, but the family carries every check itself; nobody has confirmed identification, the right to work or a DBS certificate unless you arrange it, and there is no cover if the carer cannot come one week. PrimeCarers sits between the two. Carers keep more of what they charge than they would through an agency, because no employer is taking a share, and every carer has still had an ID check, a right to work check, an accepted criminal-record check (Enhanced DBS issued within the last 2 years, DBS Update Service, Scottish PVG or Access NI) and an online interview before a family ever sees their profile.

That schedule comes from the statutory guidance under the Care Act 2014, and it applies even though the Act does not fix a single number of months for every case; the guidance is explicit that a review should happen sooner whenever circumstances change. None of it depends on your parent having a council-funded plan, either. If your family arranges and pays for care privately, the same rhythm is worth keeping to, because needs change whether or not a social worker is involved. Is your care plan still right? sets out what has usually shifted by the time a review is due and how to prepare for one. If your parent has never had a council assessment, local authority funding explains how to ask for one; it is free regardless of income.

A review meeting itself is usually short and practical rather than formal. It brings together your parent, whoever from the family is closely involved, the social worker or reviewing officer, and often the carer who has been doing the visits, because they are the one who has seen what a normal week looks like day to day. The council should tell you a review is coming and give you a chance to prepare, rather than turning up unannounced; if a date is set with no warning at all, it is reasonable to ask for it to be moved.

None of these need to wait for a form. Ring the council's adult social care team, or if your parent was never assessed, ask for a carer's assessment instead, which looks at what support you as the family carer need as well. After a hospital discharge specifically, hourly care after a hospital stay sets out what usually needs covering in the first few weeks. And if memory or confusion is behind the change, the seven stages of dementia explains how needs tend to shift as it progresses.

The scale in that figure is a reminder that caring is common, even when it can feel like something happening to your family alone at two in the morning. Humanity behind the fame looks at how caring has touched people whose lives otherwise look nothing like an ordinary family's, because the tasks and the toll are the same whoever is doing them. On PrimeCarers, families also read reviews from other families about specific carers, because the practical detail of what somebody is like day to day says more than a rating on its own.

None of this is about ranking whose caring is harder. The tasks and the tiredness are recognisable whoever is doing them, and reading about somebody else's version of it is sometimes the more useful thing to do before turning back to the practical guides.

Private carers compared with agency carers sets out why a carer working for themselves, rather than through a single employer, tends to set a different rate and take a different kind of booking. If a search is taking longer than expected, try broadening the radius by a few miles, being open to a slightly different start time, or looking at live-in care instead of several daily visits, before lowering what you are looking for in a carer.

1. 1

   Check the figure is still current

   Before you act

   Benefit rates, council thresholds and the National Living Wage all change every April. If a figure here is more than a few months old by the time you read it, check it against the source before relying on it.
2. 2

   Ask for a review or an assessment if a sign above applies

   This week

   Ring the council's adult social care team, or use the carer's assessment link above if your parent has never been assessed.
3. 3

   See what care costs where your parent lives

   Free

   A local estimate before you speak to anyone.
4. 4

   Search carers near your parent

   Free, no obligation

   Every carer's profile shows their rate, experience and availability, and every carer has an ID check, a right to work check, an accepted criminal-record check and an online interview before they appear.

Two of those steps have their own pages: the care cost calculator gives the local estimate, and searching for a carer is free and carries no obligation to book.