Rate benchmarks
What does in-home care cost per hour?
The numbers families and caregivers actually need, with the source for each one. Updated from live listings.
What caregivers on The Care Royal are asking
Not enough listings yet to publish a median honestly. There are 0 published listings with a rate on it today, and this page starts publishing our own median at 20.
We would rather show you nothing than a number computed from a handful of people. Until then, the figures below are the published ones, with their sources named.
What is the national median for in-home care?
Industry surveys put the 2026 national median for a non-medical in-home caregiver at roughly $35 an hour. Published state figures run from about $23 at the low end to $42 at the high end, so two families needing what sounds like the same help can be quoted rates that differ by nearly double.
What does skilled nursing care cost?
A different market entirely: private duty nursing runs closer to $90 an hour. Anything requiring a nursing licence — injections, wound care, clinical assessment — is priced against that, not against companion care.
Is hiring a caregiver directly cheaper than an agency?
Yes, and by a fairly consistent margin. Published comparisons put agency pricing 20–30% above the same care bought directly — commonly around $33–$40 an hour through an agency against $25–$30 hiring independently. That margin pays for recruitment, screening, supervision, insurance, payroll and someone to send a replacement when your caregiver is ill. Whether it is worth it depends on how much of that you want to carry yourself.
What should a caregiver charge?
Enough to do the job properly for years. Working directly with a family usually pays a caregiver more per hour than agency work, because there is no agency margin in between — and it also means carrying your own taxes, your own gaps between clients and your own cover when you are ill. The longer version is in what should you charge.
Where do these numbers come from?
The national and agency-comparison figures are published industry survey and comparison data, cited the same way throughout our articles. The Care Royal figure is computed from our own published listings at the moment you load the page. We do not estimate, model or fill in numbers we do not have — where we lack the sample to say something true, this page says so instead.
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