I priced home help this spring, for a house that is not mine yet. The yearly figure is the one that makes the news. The hourly one is what I wrote down.
Thirty five dollars. That is the national median for a non-medical caregiver, the aide who handles the shower, the meals, the pills, and the stairs. CareScout gathered more than 25,000 provider rates to land on it.
Run it at forty four hours a week and the year comes to $80,080. Call it $6,673 a month. Every month. More than most mortgages on my street.
Medicare pays none of that. Skilled nursing ordered by a doctor runs on a separate track. Help with the shower is your own check, every month, for as long as it is needed.
The money is only half of what you are buying. The other half is whether a person walks through the door. On a Tuesday morning, at seven.
Home health and personal care aides are already the largest single occupation in the country, roughly 4.3 million people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects about 765,800 openings in the job every year through 2034. Most of those openings exist because somebody left. The churn is the job.
Widen it to the whole direct care workforce. That means the aides in homes, in assisted living, and in nursing homes. PHI counts 9.7 million openings there between 2024 and 2034.
$35
National median hourly rate a family pays for a non-medical caregiver, 2025
$17.36
Median hourly wage for a direct care worker, 2024
Most of that gap goes back out the door as recruiting, payroll tax, insurance, and the cost of replacing people who quit. What is left is thin. Median annual earnings in direct care come to just under $26,000. That is the wage competing with every warehouse in the county.
One more number, because it decides where the cohort ends up. The median assisted living community runs $6,200 a month. Forty four hours of help at home runs $6,673.
So the house wins for a while. Then the arithmetic moves your mother into the building.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and what actually limits the spending.
Which turns the whole aisle into one question. Who can fill a Tuesday shift in a county with nobody left to hire?
The ceiling on all of it is the household. A daughter can write $6,673 a month for only so long. When she cannot, she becomes the aide herself, unpaid, on her own Tuesday.
Most of the money in this business is public money too. Medicaid covers about 68 percent of the $312.9 billion spent each year on home and community based services. That program pays for help at home instead of a bed in a facility.
One state rate decision can take an operator’s revenue down overnight.
The arithmetic
CareScout Cost of Care Survey, published March 2026, gathered more than 25,000 provider rates between July and November 2025. It puts the non-medical caregiver median at $35 an hour, $80,080 a year at 44 hours a week, and assisted living at $6,200 a month. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, home health and personal care aides: 17 percent growth 2024 to 2034, about 765,800 openings a year. PHI, Direct Care Workers in the United States Key Facts 2025: median wage $17.36 an hour in 2024, median annual earnings just under $26,000, and 9.7 million direct care openings 2024 to 2034. PHI also puts Medicaid at 68 percent of $312.9 billion in annual home and community based services spending. Medicare.gov on what home health coverage includes. The 11,400 daily 65th birthdays are the Alliance for Lifetime Income count.
The line I watch in this aisle is the wage line. Demand is already printed: 11,400 Americans turn 65 today, and the same number tomorrow. Who takes the shift is open. So when you price help for your own house, ask about the roster. The rate tells you the market. The roster tells you whether Tuesday happens.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
|
