Care Home Fees: What the Benchmarks Measure and What to Publish

Last Updated on September 8, 2026

Almost every care home in Britain refuses to publish a fee, and almost every family finds one anyway. They just find somebody else’s.

This guide sets out what the published numbers actually are, what they measure, where they disagree, and what a provider can publish without giving away the negotiation.

The published self-funder figures

Read that table twice before quoting anything from it. Neither of the two self-funder sources is a primary survey. One is a directory publishing its own listings. The other republishes a competing marketplace’s data. The third is official statistics measuring something different again.

The premium everybody quotes, and why it is nine years old

The figure in general circulation is that self-funders pay around 40 per cent more than local authorities. It comes from the Competition and Markets Authority’s care homes market study, published on 30 November 2017, which found self-pay fees on average 41 per cent higher, an average differential of £236 a week, or over £12,000 a year.

It is still the only national, methodologically consistent figure available. Everything more recent is a comparison between sources that do not measure the same thing.

To show why that matters, here is what happens if you subtract the current official unit cost from the current directory average:

• Residential 65+: £1,298 against £1,232 is a gap of £66 a week, about 5 per cent.
• Nursing 65+: £1,535 against £1,083 is a gap of £452 a week, about 42 per cent.
• A single council’s published rate: Bath and North East Somerset publishes general residential at £900.02 a week for 2026/27, which against £1,298 is a gap of £398 a week, about 44 per cent.

Those three answers cannot all be right, and the reason they differ is measurement, not reality. The DHSC unit cost is an average of what councils actually spent per person per week, which is not the same as a council’s published standard rate, and the nursing figure is depressed because NHS-funded nursing care is paid separately. The 5 per cent residential gap is almost certainly an artefact.

So: do not publish a national self-funder premium as a single number. If you need one, use the CMA’s 41 per cent and say it is from 2017.

The numbers a family will already have

Before they ring you, a reasonably diligent relative can find:

• The directory average for your region.
• Your council’s published standard rate, which councils publish openly.
• The capital thresholds. In England for 2026/27 the upper limit is £23,250 and the lower is £14,250, with a personal expenses allowance of £31.80 a week.
• For home care, the Homecare Association’s published minimum price for England of £32.14 an hour for April 2025 to March 2026.

You are not choosing whether to have a price conversation. You are choosing whether it starts from your number or somebody else’s.

What to publish

A range, by care type, with four qualifiers. Specifically:

1. A weekly range per room or care type, not a single figure.
2. Residential, nursing, dementia and respite priced separately if they differ.
3. A plain list of what is included and, more importantly, what is not.
4. A dated line saying when fees were last reviewed and when they are next reviewed.
5. One sentence on how you handle local authority funded placements and third party top-ups, because that is the question behind the question.

That is enough to anchor the conversation and not enough to remove your ability to assess an individual’s needs. The homes that publish nothing are not protecting margin. They are outsourcing the first impression of their price to a directory.

The conflict worth knowing about

carehome.co.uk is simultaneously the sector’s main directory, the source of its most-quoted fee benchmarks, and the seller of the listings those homes buy. Its published listing prices are £82.50 plus VAT a month, or £990 a year, for enhanced, and £165 plus VAT a month, or £1,980 a year, for platinum, with a free basic tier, all read on 8 September 2026.

None of that is improper and the free tier is genuinely free. It is simply worth knowing, when you cite the average, that you are citing your advertising channel’s own data about its own listings.

Common questions

Will publishing fees lose us enquiries?

It will lose you enquiries from families who cannot afford you, which is not the same thing. The measurable cost of not publishing is that the first number the family sees is a national average that may be several hundred pounds a week away from yours in either direction.

What is the current self-funder premium?

There is no reliable current national figure. The last consistent one is the CMA’s 41 per cent, or £236 a week, from November 2017. Comparisons between today’s directory averages and today’s official unit costs produce answers between 5 and 44 per cent depending on which measure you pick, which tells you the comparison is unsound rather than that the premium varies that much.

Should home care agencies publish an hourly rate?

Yes, as a range, and with a note on visit length and travel. The Homecare Association’s published minimum price for England was £32.14 an hour for 2025/26, and it reported that only 1 per cent of homecare contracts with public bodies met it. A private rate below that published minimum invites an obvious question.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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