Home care or a care home?
Most comparisons like this are written by someone who wants one answer. This one includes the cases where a care home is the better choice — because you will find those out anyway, and you should hear them from us first.
On cost, there is much less in it than people expect
Families almost always assume a care home is the cheaper option. On the published local numbers, it usually is not.
Care homes near us publish £1,795–£1,920 a week for residential dementia care, per person. Live-in care from us is £1,600–£1,850 a week including the food allowance.
So the honest headline is not "home care is cheaper". It is that the two cost about the same — which changes the question. If the money is roughly level, you are no longer choosing on price. You are choosing what the money buys.
Visiting care is a different matter: at up to about six hours a day it stays well below the cost of a care home place. Beyond that, live-in usually makes more sense — it costs less than the same hours bought as visits and it covers the night too.
What would each option cost?
An estimate, not a quote — every family's situation differs, and a care home's fee depends on the room and the assessment.
Who needs care?
Attendance Allowance
Where visiting care stops being the cheaper option
Visiting care costs about £260 a week for every hour a day — roughly one hour per visit. It stays below both live-in care and a local care home until roughly six hours a day — after that, live-in usually costs less than the same hours bought as visits, and it covers the night.
Figures checked August 2026. Care home charges are the homes' own published rates; ours are on our costs page.
What home care actually buys you
One-to-one time — and this surprises people.
Families often assume a care home means more attention, because there are more staff in the building. Several of our team have worked in both, including in management, and their experience is the opposite: homes are frequently short-staffed and carers move quickly between residents. At home, the carer's hour is yours. It can be spent going out.
Independence, in practice rather than in a brochure.
A care home runs on a timetable — shower times and mealtimes are largely fixed. At home, someone gets up when they want to get up and eats when they are hungry. Person-centred care is much easier to deliver when the day still belongs to the person.
The pet stays.
A dog or a cat matters enormously to someone living alone, and most homes cannot take them. It sounds like a small thing next to the money. For a lot of people it is not a small thing at all.
The house stays a home.
Familiar rooms, familiar street, the neighbours who notice. For someone with dementia especially, a setting they already know is doing quiet work all day long.
When a care home is the better answer
There are situations where we will tell a family that a care home is the right choice, and we do tell them — even though it costs us the work.
- Safety we cannot manage. If someone cannot be kept safe at home, that outranks everything else on this page.
- Twenty-four-hour nursing, or needs that require a clinical setting rather than a domestic one.
- Severe mental health needs where someone requires a level of supervision or intervention that home care cannot provide.
- Loneliness, where live-in is not an option. A real strength of a good care home is company all day. If someone is at genuine risk of isolation and live-in care is not affordable or wanted, that company can be worth more than the setting.
We would rather lose the hours than keep someone at home where they should not be. If we think that, you will hear it from us plainly.
“Will the council pay?” has a different answer at each home
Care homes choose which funding routes they accept, and they do not all accept the same ones. Of the local homes that publish this, some take council funding only with a weekly top-up from the family, and some do not take NHS Continuing Healthcare at all. Others accept every route.
A top-up is not a one-off. It is a payment someone has to keep making, every week, for as long as the placement lasts — and families often discover the requirement late, once a place has been chosen and a move is underway.
Ask the question before you fall in love with a home: which funding routes do you accept, and if the council funds the place, what top-up would we be committing to?
What about the house?
This is the part families are most often surprised by, and it can matter more than the weekly figures.
For care at home, the value of the home is never counted in the council's financial assessment. Age UK put it plainly: “Unless you're moving into a care home, this won't take into account the value of your property.”
For a permanent care home place it is counted — though not straight away, and not always. It is disregarded for the first 12 weeks. A Deferred Payment Agreement lets the council pay the fees and recover the money later, rather than forcing a sale. And it is disregarded entirely if a partner still lives there, or a relative aged 60 or over or with a disability does.
Where nobody qualifying lives in the property, the practical position is that its value funds the care either way — by sale, or by a deferred payment repaid from the estate. What changes is the timing, and whether the house stays in the family in the meantime.
We are a care provider, not financial advisers, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For your own situation, talk to Age UK or an independent financial adviser who specialises in later-life care.
Most people leave it later than they meant to
Our team notice that people often decline quite quickly after moving into a home. We are careful about what we read into that, because the honest explanation is probably the simple one: people usually move at the point things have already started to slip. The decline was under way before the move.
But it points at something useful. The families who do best are not the ones who choose correctly between two options in a crisis — they are the ones who got a bit of help in early, while there was still a choice to make calmly.
An hour a day, a few days a week, is often enough to hold a situation steady for a long time. It is a much easier decision than the one you are reading this page to make.
Questions families ask us
Close to it, and often less. Live-in care with us is £1,600–£1,850 a week including the food allowance. Local homes publish £1,795–£1,920 a week for residential dementia care. At the top of our banding and the bottom of theirs the two are level; across most of the range live-in costs less.
Not immediately, and sometimes not at all. The value of the home is disregarded for the first 12 weeks, and a Deferred Payment Agreement lets the council pay and recover the money later instead of forcing a sale. If a partner still lives there, or a relative aged 60 or over or with a disability does, the home is disregarded entirely. What is true is that unless someone qualifying lives there, the property's value ultimately funds the care either way. For care at home it is never counted at all.
It depends who is paying. GOV.UK says you cannot usually get Attendance Allowance if you live in a care home and your care is paid for by your local authority — but you can still claim it if you pay all your care home costs yourself. At home it is unaffected.
No, and we will tell you when it is not. If someone cannot be kept safe at home, needs 24-hour nursing, or needs care we are not able to give, a care home is the right answer and we will say so — even though it costs us the work.
This is where the gap is widest. Two care home places are two full fees. Two people at home are usually one package, priced at the upper end but still one package. On published local figures that difference runs to tens of thousands of pounds a year.
Yes, and most families do. Visits can be half an hour once a day or several hours across the day, and they can go up or down as things change. Nothing here is a one-way door.
Not sure which way to go?
Tell us the situation and we'll give you a straight answer — including if that answer is a care home.