Your parents may need a caregiver soon. Here’s what that costs in 2026
At some point, the conversation has to happen. Not when things are fine and everyone is busy, but before the phone call that changes everything. Most families don’t look at these numbers until they have to. By then, the context is wrong; you’re exhausted, someone is in a hospital bed, and decisions that should take weeks are taking hours. The CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey pulled more than 25,000 rates from providers across the country. Worth looking at now, while there’s still time to look.
In-home non-medical care: $35 an hour
Someone comes to the house. Helps with meals, bathing, getting dressed, and getting out. The national median for that in 2025 is $35 an hour, up 3% from last year, which sounds manageable until you price it out at 44 hours a week. That’s what full-time coverage actually requires: $80,080 a year. Not a facility, not a nursing home, just someone in the house consistently enough to make staying home viable. Most families hear the hourly rate first and don’t do the annual math until they’re already committed.
Private duty nursing: $90 an hour
CareScout added this to the survey in 2025, which suggests what families are increasingly asking for. Private duty nursing is skilled clinical care in the home: wound care, medication management, and monitoring by someone with the training to handle what a home health aide cannot legally do. The median runs $90 an hour or $160 per visit. What catches people off guard is that this often runs alongside non-medical care, not instead of it. Two separate costs, same parent, same week.
Adult day health care: $95 a day
Every other category in the 2025 survey went up. This one dropped 5%, to $95 a day nationally. Private pay rates here are benchmarked to Medicaid reimbursement rates, and when those moved, the market followed. Five days a week runs about $24,700 a year. For families where a parent can still come home at night but needs structure during working hours, it’s the most cost-effective option in the survey. Whether the 2025 decline holds is a different question.
Assisted living: $6,200 a month
Up 5% from 2024, which is actually the good news; the year before saw double-digit increases. The national median is now $6,200 a month, or $74,400 annually. Assisted living pricing moves with rental housing trends because room and board is embedded in the monthly rate. The forces driving that number are not specific to healthcare. They are the same forces driving rent everywhere.
Nursing home care: up to $129,575 a year
Semi-private room: $315 a day. Private room: $355. Annual totals of $114,975 and $129,575, both up modestly. Six figures a year for the highest-acuity care setting is the number families face when a parent’s needs exceed what any other option can provide, and most families face it without having planned for it.
The bottom line
Cost growth slowed in 2025. What didn’t slow down is the cost itself: $80,000 a year for in-home care. $74,000 for assisted living. Over $114,000 for a nursing home. The time to look at these numbers is before you need them.
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