The Homecare Deficit 2025

The Homecare Association wanted to calculate the current funding deficit in homecare. This is the gap between the budget allocated and the amount needed to ensure high-quality, sustainable services.  

We asked 276 public organisations in the United Kingdom about fees paid for homecare services. These included local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland; Health and Social Care (HSC) Trusts in Northern Ireland; Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in England; Local Health Boards in Wales; and regional NHS Boards in Scotland. We used the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 to gather this information.  

We asked each public organisation to provide information, including on the hourly prices it paid to providers, the hours purchased from providers and its total spend on homecare. We asked about regulated homecare services delivered to people aged 65 years and over by homecare providers in the independent and voluntary sector during a sample week in April 2025. 

We used the figures to compute the deficit in funding for homecare hours currently purchased. This is based on careworkers receiving the same wage as NHS Band 3 healthcare assistants with 2+ years’ experience (£13.60 per hour in 2025-26).  

We confined the Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the care of older people. This is partly because services for this group make up the bulk of many independent and voluntary sector providers’ work. In addition, services for younger adults also often cost more, which risks hiding underfunding of care for older people. 

Two Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) - South Yorkshire ICB and West Yorkshire ICB - split their responses by area (namely, the old Clinical Commissioning Groups within the ICB), resulting in 282 responses. This figure excludes Enfield Council that replied too late to be included in our analysis. 264 of the organisations contacted purchase homecare services from the independent and voluntary sector. 

This report is the sixth such Freedom of Information exercise undertaken. It analyses the data from responses to the request and updates our findings from previous editions, most recently in 2023. 

Click below to read the report.

The Homecare Deficit 2025