Care Home Cost Calculator

Care home costs in England are means-tested by the local authority. If your total assessable assets exceed the upper capital limit of £23,250, you are fully self-funded and pay the full weekly care fee. Below £23,250 the council works out a charge from your income: in a care home you keep a Personal Expenses Allowance of £31.80 a week, and with care at home you keep a Minimum Income Guarantee, £241.45 a week for a single person at Pension Credit age. Between £14,250 and £23,250, £1 a week of tariff income is added for every £250, or part of £250, above the lower limit.

The sums involved change the arithmetic quickly. Self-funders paid an average of £1,300 a week for residential care and £1,512 for nursing care across the UK (Lottie, January 2026, as reported by Which?), about £67,600 and £78,600 a year. Regional averages for residential care run from £1,095 a week in the North East to £1,456 in London, and individual homes can charge far more. On the same data, hourly home care averaged £32 an hour and live-in care £220 a day, about £1,540 a week. Someone with £40,000 of savings, £250 a week of pension and a partner still at home would pay £1,300 a week, draw about £1,082 a week from savings and reach the £23,250 threshold in roughly 15 weeks.

Your home is included in the means test when you enter permanent residential care and the property is empty, unless a spouse, civil partner, dependent child under 18, or a qualifying carer still lives there. A disabled child or a relative over 60 remaining in the property has the same effect, and the home is always ignored when you receive care in it. If it is included, the council must still disregard its value for the first 12 weeks of permanent care. After that it often creates a large asset, which is usually the point at which self-funding becomes unavoidable.

A Deferred Payment Agreement (DPA) allows the council to fund your care, taking a legal charge on the property to be repaid when it is eventually sold. Nothing has to be sold during your lifetime, because the council recovers the money from the estate on death or sale. Interest is charged up to a national maximum rate that is reset on 1 January and 1 July in line with government borrowing costs, 4.65% a year from 1 July 2026, and councils can add an administration fee for setting it up. You need to own the property, need residential care, and have no qualifying relative living there. The arrangement suits a depressed property market or a household where a spouse needs to stay put, though the debt mounts quickly and the interest eats into what is left behind.

NHS Continuing Healthcare changes the picture entirely when it applies. Where the primary need is health rather than social care, the NHS funds 100% of the cost with no income cap and no capital test. Assessment runs through the Decision Support Tool, which scores 12 domains covering mobility, cognition, behaviour, continence and more, against the 'primary health need' criterion. Referrals usually begin with the GP. Most applications are refused first time and go to appeal, where independent advocates charging £1,500-£5,000 have a reasonable record of overturning decisions.

The proposed £86,000 lifetime care cap was originally set for October 2023, delayed to 2025, and subsequently indefinitely postponed. The idea goes back to the Dilnot Commission of 2011, which recommended a £35,000 cap, and the figure was revised to £86,000 in 2021 and legislated for in the Health and Care Act 2022 before the October 2025 date was abandoned by the incoming government in 2024. As of April 2026, the £23,250 upper and £14,250 lower capital thresholds remain in force in England, and long-term care funding is still the country's biggest unresolved social policy question.

The rest of the UK does things differently. Scotland provides free personal care to adults of any age who are assessed as needing it, so personal care at home costs nothing, and a care home resident gets £260.30 a week towards personal care from April 2026, plus £117.10 a week for nursing care where it is needed. Wales raised its residential care capital limit to £50,000 on 8 April 2019, a considerably more generous line than the English one. Northern Ireland applies the same limits as England, so the same £23,250 and £14,250 figures decide who pays.