Care Worker Pay in the UK: 2026 Rates Explained

The £13.45 an hour median, unpacked

The £13.45 figure is not a guess and not an average — it is the median from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, provisional release, covering the pay period that included April 2025. For SOC 2020 code 6135 — care workers and home carers, all employees — the median is £13.45 an hour and £457.60 a week. Half of employed care workers earned more and half earned less; it is the middle of the pack, not an average dragged up by a few high earners.

The two figures tell different stories, and the weekly one needs a warning. £457.60 a week divided by £13.45 an hour implies about 34 hours — but that is not a typical full-time week, it is a blend of full-time and part-time workers averaged together. Care is one of the most part-time workforces in the country: school-run shifts, evening-only rotas and workers holding care alongside another job all drag the weekly median down. Read the hourly figure as the rate for the job and the weekly figure as what people actually grossed once part-time is mixed in.

Turned into annual figures at honest hours: £13.45 × 37.5 hours × 52 weeks = £26,227.50; at 40 hours, £27,976.00; at a part-time 20 hours, £13,988.00; at 24 hours, £16,785.60. On the £26,227.50 full-time figure, the 2026/27 England tax model gives £21,683.85 a year take-home — £1,806.99 a month, £417.00 a week. Two caveats: the median sits just 74p above the £12.71 National Living Wage (from 1 April 2026), and ASHE covers employees only — self-employed live-in carers are not in the figure at all.

Domiciliary vs residential: two different paydays

Domiciliary care — home care — pays by the visit. A carer might do six 45-minute calls in a day: medication, washing, meals, companionship, moving from house to house. The pay is for the contact time, but the working day is longer than the contact time, and this is where the minimum-wage maths bites. Time spent travelling between appointments counts as working time for minimum-wage purposes (Regulation 20 of the NMW Regulations 2015); the drive from home to the first client and from the last client home is commuting and does not count.

Residential care — care homes — pays by the shift. Eight- or twelve-hour shifts, day and night rotas, and sleep-ins: the overnight shift where the carer sleeps on the premises in case they are needed. Sleep-ins are usually paid as a fixed nightly rate on top of the day's shift pay — and the law on them is settled, not grey. In Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8, the Supreme Court held that a care worker on a sleep-in is not doing 'time work' for minimum-wage purposes while asleep; only time actually spent awake for the purposes of working counts. That is why a flat £55-a-night sleep-in payment is lawful even though £55 divided by eight hours of sleep is below the £12.71 floor.

A planned Fair Pay Agreement for adult social care — sector-wide pay bargaining under the Employment Rights Act 2025, expected around April 2028 — could one day rewrite the sleep-in and travel-time rules, but it does not overturn the Mencap ruling. The full treatment of both puzzles, with the maths worked through, is on the sleep-in and travel pay page.

A day in the life: what the pay actually looks like

Take a domiciliary carer on the £13.45 median. Six 45-minute visits: 4.5 hours of paid contact time, £60.53 for the day. But between those visits there are drives, waits and gaps — say 15 minutes of travel between each call, another 1.25 hours of the working day. The carer left home at 8 and is back at 3: seven hours out of the house for £60.53. Spread over the time away from home, that is about £8.65 an hour — and once the between-visit travel is counted as working time under Reg 20, the effective hourly rate for minimum-wage purposes is £60.53 over 5.75 hours, or £10.53: below the £12.71 legal floor. That is the tripwire domiciliary pay keeps hitting, and it is exactly what the travel-time rule exists to catch.

Now a residential carer on the same £13.45. A 12-hour day shift: £161.40. Add a sleep-in that night at a typical £55 fixed payment: £216.40 for the day, on site from 8am to 8am. The headline looks far better — but the working reality is 12 hours of active care plus a night of broken-or-not sleep, and the asleep hours are not minimum-wage time work, which is what makes the fixed payment lawful.

Neither day is better in the abstract; they are different bargains. Domiciliary pays you for the care and argues about the gaps; residential pays you for the shift and argues about the night. Run your own pattern through the take-home calculator — paid hours only — and read the sleep-in and travel pay page before deciding which bargain you are actually being offered.

Part-time is the norm, and the weekly figure proves it

Care work runs on part-time rotas: the morning rush of calls before school drop-off, the evening round after tea, weekend-only bank shifts. The ONS weekly median of £457.60 — implying roughly 34 hours at the median rate — is the statistical fingerprint of that pattern. A full-time 37.5-hour week at £13.45 is £504.38 a week gross, well above the weekly median; the median worker is not doing that week.

The engine-computed 2026/27 England take-home figures, auto-enrolment on, show what part-time actually pays. At 20 hours a week — £13,988.00 a year — the take-home is £13,312.03 a year: £1,109.34 a month, £256.00 a week. At 24 hours — £16,785.60 a year — it is £15,225.59 a year: £1,268.80 a month, £292.80 a week. At 30 hours — £20,982.00 a year — £18,095.93 a year: £1,507.99 a month, £348.00 a week.

At the bottom of the ladder, the tax system barely touches the pay. A 16-hour week at £13.45 is £11,190.40 a year — below the £12,570 personal allowance and the National Insurance threshold, so there is no income tax and no NI; the only deduction is the £247.52 auto-enrolment pension, leaving £10,942.88 a year (£911.91 a month). That is the honest picture for the shortest rotas: the pay is what it is, and at least HMRC takes nothing.

What lifts a care worker above the median

The Care Certificate is the starting line — the induction standard most employers expect — and the NVQs are the rungs. An NVQ Level 2 in Health and Social Care typically marks out the experienced carer; the Level 3 opens senior care worker roles, which are written up separately and sit clearly above the £13.45 median. Qualifications in care are not decoration: the sector's pay spine, such as it is, runs through them.

Night shifts and weekends carry premiums in many care homes — typically a pound or two an hour above the day rate, labelled here as a typical market range since the ONS does not split it out. Specialist work pays more still: dementia care, learning disability support, complex needs, end-of-life care. These are harder shifts emotionally and practically, and the better employers price that in.

Live-in care is the outlier: usually self-employed, paid by the week rather than the hour for round-the-clock availability with breaks, and outside the ASHE figures entirely. The weekly fee reflects seven days of being there, not shift hours — compare it on its own terms, and remember the self-employed tax maths (Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance, expenses against income) is different from the employee model on this site.

Agency, bank and zero-hours

Agency care work pays the highest hourly rates in the sector — commonly £14 to £17 an hour, a typical market range — because the rate has to compensate for what it does not include: no guaranteed hours, no paid holidays accruing on a steady rota, no employer pension contribution, gaps between placements that pay nothing. It suits carers who want to choose their weeks and can survive the empty ones.

Bank work is the middle ground: the care home's own pool of extra staff, called in to cover sickness and holidays. The rate usually sits between the substantive and the agency rate, and the advantage is familiarity — the same residents, the same routines — without the agency's cut in the middle.

Zero-hours contracts remain common, especially in domiciliary care, where the rota flexes with client need. The honest comparison is not agency rate versus employed rate; it is agency rate times the hours you actually get, against the employed rate times contracted hours plus paid holidays and a pension. Run both through the calculator with honest hours before choosing.

Where the numbers come from

The pay benchmarks on this hub are the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional) medians for SOC 2020 code 6135, care workers and home carers, all employees, pay period including April 2025: £13.45 an hour and £457.60 a week. The hourly figure is the rate anchor; the weekly figure blends full- and part-time workers and is labelled as such wherever it appears.

All take-home figures on this hub run through the 2026/27 England tax model: £12,570 personal allowance, 20% basic rate to £50,270, employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above, and auto-enrolment pension at 5% of qualifying earnings (£6,240–£50,270) treated as salary sacrifice. The National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour (age 21+, from 1 April 2026) is from GOV.UK. Typical market ranges — domiciliary and agency hourly bands, sleep-in nightly payments, night premiums — are labelled as typical ranges, not ONS data.

Sleep-in law is from the Supreme Court in Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8, via the GOV.UK minimum wage blog. The travel-between-appointments rule is Regulation 20 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015. HMRC approved mileage rates for 2026/27 — 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, 25p after — are from GOV.UK.

How to use this hub

Start with the take-home calculator: enter £13.45 or your own rate, set your real weekly hours — most care workers should not use 37.5 — and see the monthly figure the 2026/27 model produces. Working domiciliary with travel gaps, or doing sleep-ins on a residential rota? The sleep-in and travel pay page works both arrangements through properly, including the minimum-wage tripwires. Weighing agency against a substantive post? Put honest hours in for both before deciding.

Reviewed and updated

Pay figures, the worked examples and the legal position on sleep-ins and travel time were last reviewed on 24 September 2026 against the ONS ASHE 2025 provisional release and GOV.UK guidance. The tax model covers 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027. The Fair Pay Agreement mechanism for adult social care is expected around April 2028 — this page will be revisited when it lands.