Why nobody will drive twelve miles: the real geography of the carer shortage

Families in thinly populated parts of the country are usually told the same thing: there is nobody available near you. Often there is somebody, eight or twelve miles away, and the job as advertised simply does not pay for the drive. One of those is a headcount problem you cannot fix on your own. The other is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be changed.

Private Carers – The Definitive Guide (Updated for 2024)

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The shortage is often not a shortage of people

In any given month we speak to families who cannot find a single carer for a parent, and to carers living in the same region who have been registered for years without a booking. One carer told our team she had applied for around twenty jobs over nearly three years and never been hired. Almost everything within reach was live-in work, which she could not take with a four year old at home, or it was too far to drive for the hours on offer.

I have been with you nearly three years, and I have never worked for you.

In the same period, a relative called us about a man in his eighties who had recovered from cancer surgery in a rural area and been cleared to leave hospital. He could not go home, because nobody had been found for short daily morning visits.

He has been passed by social services as being able to come home, but they cannot find care for him.

Both of those things are true at once, and they are frequently happening within twenty minutes of each other. That is the puzzle worth understanding before you widen your search radius again.

What a one hour visit actually pays

A self-employed carer working privately in 2026 typically charges £18 to £25 an hour. Picture a single one hour visit, twelve miles away down country lanes.

• The drive is twenty five to thirty five minutes each way, so the visit costs her roughly two hours of her day.
• A twenty four mile round trip in her own car costs something like £10 once fuel, tyres, servicing and wear are counted.
• She is paid for one hour. Nobody pays for the travel, and there is no sick pay, no holiday pay and no mileage unless she has agreed it with the client.

That works out at something like £8 to £12 an hour for the time she actually gives up, before tax. She is not being difficult when she turns it down. She is doing the sum.

If it is just one hour every day, it is really hard.

A carer who used to work regularly through the platform told us she had stopped applying altogether, because so many invitations were for single hour visits that were not worth the journey alongside her other job. We would far rather a carer declined than took the work and quietly resented it, or dropped it after a fortnight. Declining is useful information about what an area needs, not a black mark.

The fix that works most often: fewer, longer visits

Most home care rotas are shaped the way commissioned packages are shaped: four short calls a day, spread from early morning to bedtime. Morning, lunch, tea, bed. For the person doing it, that is four round trips, four sets of fuel, and a day chopped into pieces too small to hold another client.

It really does need to be somebody who is fairly local, otherwise they are just going to be chasing their backsides to get to Mum three times a day.

Two visits of ninety minutes, morning and evening, is a completely different job: two journeys, three paid hours, and a shape somebody can build a week around. In our experience this one change turns a great many unfillable rural jobs into fillable ones.

You do lose the middle of the day. Families usually cover that with some combination of:

• lunch prepared at the morning visit and left ready
• a phone or video call at a fixed time
• a neighbour or relative dropping in two or three days a week
• a pendant alarm, a medication dispenser or a simple sensor setup, which can carry more of the reassurance than families expect, as we cover in our guide to how technology can reduce your need for private carers

Why it usually costs about the same, or less

Four half hour agency visits a day is two hours of care. At 2026 agency rates of roughly £25 to £35 an hour, often with a minimum charge for a short call, that lands somewhere near £50 to £70 a day. Two ninety minute visits from a private carer at £18 to £25 an hour is three hours of care for roughly £54 to £75 a day.

Similar money, half again as much time on the ground, and a job somebody will actually take. Private arrangements are usually cheaper per hour than agency cover, though never guaranteed to be, and the gap varies by area. Do the sum with your own figures, starting from our page on what a private carer costs per hour.

The same logic scales up. A son managing his mother’s care was paying around £4,000 a month for three short double-up visits a day, and was startled to hear what that budget could buy instead.

For £4,000 a month, you could get a live-in carer to be there full time.

That will not suit every household. But if the rota you pay for is mostly buying journeys rather than time, check what the same money looks like in a different shape. A fuller breakdown sits in what home care actually costs, seven real bills broken down.

Travel time is the real boundary, not miles

Search filters work in miles. Carers work in minutes. Twelve miles across a town at seven in the morning is twenty minutes. Twelve miles of single track lane, a school run and a slow bridge can be forty five. Two carers we put forward for one job both turned it down over the commute, and both were well inside the radius the family had set.

If you are writing a job post, this is what helps:

• Give the nearest town and a rough journey time from it, not just a postcode.
• Say plainly whether the carer needs to drive, and whether there is parking. Where public transport is thin, finding a carer who drives is often the whole job.
• Offer blocks of hours rather than scattered calls, and say which parts of the timing are flexible.
• Consider paying mileage for a long journey, or agreeing a rate that reflects the distance. It is cheaper than an empty rota.

If you do pay for mileage, ask the carer to check their car insurance covers business use, and hire and reward cover too if they are charging you for miles driven with your relative in the car. Separately, work booked and paid through PrimeCarers is covered by PrimeCarers’ insurance, while work arranged privately outside the platform is not, so a carer doing that needs their own public liability cover.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

When the geography really is thin

Sometimes it is not the shape of the job. Some districts genuinely have very few carers registered anywhere nearby. One carer with six years of experience, needing overnight shifts to fit around a young child, found the only job within reach required a carer who spoke a particular language.

There is literally nobody here where I am. Like, there is literally nobody.

Another family had tried social media, five or six agencies, cards in shop windows and word of mouth before they reached us.

We have tried everything. Cards up, and shop windows.

When a family is in that position, the honest advice is to run several routes at once rather than waiting on one:

• Word of mouth still outperforms everything in small communities. One daughter found a private carer at £21 an hour within half an hour of asking a friend of a friend, after getting nowhere online for weeks.
• Ask at local care homes. Staff there sometimes pick up private hours around their shifts.
• Ask the district nurse, the GP surgery and the pharmacy who they see working in the area.
• Post the job even if the map looks empty. Carers in the area are notified of new work, and plenty are not actively searching.
• For the remotest addresses, live-in care removes the travel problem completely, because the carer relocates for the placement rather than commuting to it.

If council funding or a direct payment is part of your plan, expect the process to take time. Assessment teams are under real pressure. What helps is keeping a short dated log of what you have tried and what has failed, asking your social worker directly how they would like a request worded and what evidence supports it, and agreeing a date to speak again so that chasing feels like a diary note rather than a complaint. Our guide to local authority funding for care at home covers what the assessment looks at.

If you are a carer in an area with little work

The same geography that strands families strands carers, and the advice runs in the other direction.

• Set your availability precisely, including the longest journey you will accept, so you stop seeing jobs you were never going to take.
• Decline clearly rather than ignoring an invitation. It tells us what the area actually needs.
• Say in your profile that you drive, and how far you will travel for a block of hours rather than for a single call.
• Ask a family directly whether two longer visits would work instead of four short ones. Many have never been offered the option.
• Consider whether overnight or occasional live-in work opens up jobs that hourly work near you does not. Registered for years and never booked goes through the rest of it.

What to do next

1. Redesign the rota before you widen the radius. Aim for two blocks of at least ninety minutes, and write down honestly what the middle of the day actually needs.
2. Price both versions with your own numbers, short agency calls against longer private visits, so the decision is made on figures rather than assumption.
3. Rewrite the job post in journey times rather than miles, state whether driving is essential, and say which hours are flexible.
4. Run the local routes in parallel: word of mouth, care home staff, the district nurse and the online post, all in the same week rather than one after another.
5. If a hospital discharge is being held up, tell the ward and the social work team precisely what is missing, ask what short term support exists while a longer arrangement is found, and ask them to note the delay and its reason in writing.

Related reading

• Agency, platform, or on your own: the trade you are actually making
• Twenty-four hours: how an urgent live-in placement actually gets filled
• Registered for years, never booked: why good carers do not get work
• What home care actually costs: seven real bills, broken down
• The cost of live-in care