How much does a private carer cost per hour in the UK?

If you are not sure how many hours to put in, build the week from tasks rather than from a feeling. Forty minutes of washing and dressing plus twenty minutes for breakfast and tablets is an hour every morning, which is seven hours a week. How many visits a week your parent needs works that out from a tick list. Past about 35 hours a week the sums start to favour live-in care, which is why the estimator flags it.

Read the chart as a market rather than a price list. There is a thick band in the middle where most carers sit, a smaller group below it who are newer to the platform or offer companionship rather than personal care, and a group above it made up of experienced carers, specialists in dementia or complex needs, and carers in the more expensive parts of the country. Families almost always book from the middle. The ones paying at the top are usually paying for a particular skill, not a better person.

The average on that chart has moved since this guide was first written. In 2023 the average advertised hourly rate on the platform was £18.08. Carers' rates have risen with the cost of living since, as they have everywhere in care, and the live figure above is the one to plan around.

A private carer is cheaper than an agency for one reason: nobody in the middle is taking a cut of every hour. The carer is self-employed, sets their own rate and keeps it, less our fee, which is already inside the price you see. What you take on in return is the choosing. You read profiles, rates and reviews, speak to two or three carers, and agree the visits with the one you like. We check identity, right to work and an enhanced DBS, interview every carer online before their profile appears, and keep monitoring the DBS for as long as they work. Their skills and training are for you to ask about, and how we check carers sets out exactly where that line sits.

Finding a carer yourself is cheaper again on paper, by a few pounds an hour. Against that, put the certificates to chase, the contract to write, the insurance to ask about, and the fortnight when your carer is on holiday and nobody has arranged cover. If you set their hours, direct how the work is done and provide the equipment, HMRC may also treat the carer as your employee, with PAYE, holiday pay and pension duties attached. Can I employ a private carer? explains where that line falls, and agency or private carer sets the three routes side by side.

Companionship sits at the bottom of the card because the work is company, a walk, a meal together and help with the post rather than personal care, and carers price it that way. What a companion carer costs covers it in more detail. Nights are the line that surprises families most, in both directions. A sleeping night at £130 works out at about £12 an hour across an eleven-hour night, which is far less than the hourly rate, because most of the night is spent asleep. A waking night costs more because the carer is working the whole time. Do night carers sleep? explains the difference, and the cost of night care has the live night averages.

Live-in care is where the per-hour way of thinking stops being useful. One carer in the house from £1,050 a week, typically £1,120, is about £160 a day for a carer who is there for the morning, the meals, the evening and the night. That is why the estimator points at live-in once the hours pass 35 a week. For a couple, one carer looking after both of them is about £1,350 a week, against roughly £2,320 for two care home places. The cost of live-in care and is live-in care cheaper than a care home? do those sums in full.

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

Location moves the rate less than most people expect. Agencies charge a clear London premium; private carers price against the carers they compete with locally, and on the platform the spread between areas is under a pound an hour. What does change 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 village you may have three, and the sensible move is to book the one who suits you before another family does. Every town and city page publishes its own local average.

Two of these catch families out. The first is bank holidays, which are charged at one and a half times the carer's normal rate and Christmas Day at double. That is contractual rather than a carer's preference, and it is worth knowing before you plan cover for the Easter weekend. Weekend, evening and bank holiday rates sets out how the uplifts work. The second is a visit you cancel. Unless it is because of unplanned hospitalisation or illness, or the carer agrees to another reason, a cancelled visit is payable in full, because the carer kept that hour for you and turned other work away. We charge nothing ourselves for a cancellation, and carers can and often do waive it, but it is their decision. Cancellations and late-running visits explains the 48 hours' notice that applies to hourly care.

Travel goes the other way: it is not charged at all unless you have agreed it in advance and in writing, including the rate and when it applies. Most carers include getting to your house in their rate. Where a carer drives your relative to appointments or the shops in their own car, the usual arrangement is the HMRC rate of 55p a mile, agreed beforehand. For live-in care, the extras are practical rather than financial: a room of their own, and meals from the household shop, which most families budget at £5 to £10 a day.

Some private health or long-term care policies pay towards care at home, so if your relative holds one it is worth reading the policy before you assume it does not. Funding care walks through the routes in the order to try them, and the different types of care funding explains who pays what.

The saving on its own is not the point. 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.