Home care hourly rates by council: who pays the most?

Of the home care hourly rates councils paid in 2025/26, Hertfordshire paid the most, at £31.82 an hour. Harrow paid the least, at £18.45. The median across 152 English councils was £24.05 an hour, up 5.8% on 2024/25. Kent ranks 14th at £28.05, and London boroughs fill 9 of the bottom ten places.

If you are starting a home care business, this is the number that decides whether council work is worth having. Every contact hour has to cover the care worker's pay at no less than the National Living Wage, their travel time between visits, holiday pay, employer National Insurance, pension, training, supervision, the office, insurance and CQC fees, before any profit. This article sets out who pays what, how rates moved, where good rates meet crowded markets, and how Kent compares. If you are a family looking up the home care cost per hour, note that these are the rates councils pay agencies for council funded care. Agencies set their own prices for people who pay privately.

How much do home care hourly rates vary?

Half of councils pay between £22.80 and £25.88 an hour. The highest rate is £13.37 an hour above the lowest. On a full time caseload of contact hours, that gap is the difference between a business that can pay above the wage floor and one that struggles to pay it at all.

The highest and lowest payers

The top five are Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire, Doncaster and Wiltshire, a mix of county councils and northern metropolitan boroughs. No London borough makes the top ten; leaving aside the City of London (£27.40), which buys care for very few people, the best paying borough is Merton, at £26.06, 33rd in England.

London against the rest

The median London borough pays £22.85 an hour, against £24.40 for the rest of England, a gap of £1.55. 28 of London's 33 boroughs pay below the England median. Shorter journeys between visits may explain part of this, since less unpaid travel time needs to be built into each hour. London also has more services per older resident: a median of 18 community services per 1,000 people aged 85+, against 9 elsewhere. We cannot say from this data which way the link runs, only that London combines lower rates with denser markets.

Region by region

The South West has the highest median at £27.19 an hour, followed by Yorkshire and the Humber at £25.67. London is lowest. The South East median is £24.11. The last column shows what is left of the median hourly rate after paying one hour at the 2025/26 National Living Wage of £12.21: the money that has to cover travel, on costs, overheads and profit.

Change on last year

The median council raised its home care rate by 5.8% for 2025/26. The National Living Wage rose by 6.7% in April 2025, from £11.44 to £12.21. 107 of 152 councils raised their rate by less than the wage floor rose. 1 council reported a lower rate: West Berkshire. The largest rise was in Nottinghamshire, at 10.3%. From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71, so check whether the council's 2026/27 uplift has kept pace.

Where high rates meet crowded markets

A good rate is worth less if dozens of other agencies are chasing the same packages. CQC lists the community services registered in each council area, which is mostly home care. Essex has the most at 494, then Kent (442) and Hampshire (386). Large councils naturally have more services, so we also show services per 1,000 people aged 85+, the age group most likely to need care at home.

25 councils pay at or above the median rate and are in the top quarter for the number of services. These are the markets where the rate is attractive and the competition is heaviest. At the other end, 23 councils pay at or above the median and are in the bottom quarter for services per 1,000 aged 85+, including Derbyshire, Northumberland, East Sussex, Devon. Those may be easier places to win work, though rural travel times can eat into a good rate.

Kent and its neighbours

Kent pays £28.05 an hour, 14th of 152 and £4.00 above the median. Medway, the unitary council for Chatham, Gillingham, Rochester and Strood, pays £21.92, 131st in England. That is £6.13 an hour less for the same kind of visit a few miles away, and Medway has 21 services per 1,000 aged 85+ against Kent's 9. An agency based near the border should price the two councils as separate markets.

Competition inside Kent, district by district

Kent has 442 community services registered with CQC, 405 of which provide home care, or 12.7 for every 10,000 people aged 65+. New registrations have run at 36 in 2022, 49 in 2023, 55 in 2024 and 51 in 2025, against 14, 23, 20 and 27 closures. In the 24 months to October 2026, 85 services opened and 47 closed. 49% of Kent's community services have no CQC rating yet, which may reflect how many are new. The market is fragmented: 92% of the 376 operators run a single service.

The districts differ a lot. Dartford has 41.0 services per 10,000 aged 65+, 3.2 times the Kent figure, while Folkestone and Hythe has 6.7. Rural districts with fewer services may be easier to enter, but expect longer drives between visits.

How to start a home care business: what the rates and the map tell you

Registration and the legal steps are set out in CQC's own guidance. This section covers the market side: which rate you will be paid and how crowded the area already is. Three checks from this data are worth doing before you sign a lease or recruit a team.

Know which council rate applies. The council that funds the client sets the rate, whichever office you work from. Kent paid £28.05 an hour in 2025/26 and Medway £21.92. If those rates had not moved, one contact hour at the April 2026 National Living Wage of £12.71 would leave £15.34 in Kent and £9.21 in Medway to cover travel, on costs, the office and any profit. Check the council's 2026/27 uplift before you rely on either figure.

Know which districts are crowded. In Kent, Dartford, Gravesham and Maidstone have the most community services for their population aged 65+, at 41.0, 17.9 and 15.4 per 10,000. Folkestone and Hythe, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells have the fewest, at 6.7, 7.5 and 8.5. A thinner district may be easier to win work in, but check the drive times between likely clients.

Know how fast the market is moving. 85 community services opened in Kent in the 24 months to October 2026 and 47 closed. Anyone starting a home care business there is joining a market where 92% of operators run a single service.

How we worked this out

Home care hourly rates come from each council's Market Sustainability and Improvement Fund return for 2025/26, published by DHSC, which gives the average rate the council pays per contact hour of home care and the figure for 2024/25. 152 councils reported a rate; the Isles of Scilly did not. We ranked the rates, took medians for London, the rest of England and each of the nine regions, and worked out the change on the year. Counts of community services come from CQC's register of active locations on 1 October 2026, and population aged 85+ and 65+ from ONS 2022 based projections for 2026. National Living Wage rates come from gov.uk.