Average Cost of Long-Term Care: Home Care, Assisted Living, and Nursing Homes

One Number Does Not Exist — But the Ranges Do

Families searching for the average cost of long-term care usually want a single figure to plan against. There is not one, because "long-term care" spans four very different settings with four very different price structures — and because prices vary sharply by state. What you can plan against are the ranges, and the math of how each setting scales as care needs grow.

The Cost Ladder by Setting

Home care is priced by the hour, typically $30-$35 or more per hour for a licensed agency caregiver. That makes it the cheapest setting for light needs and the most expensive for heavy ones:

• 4 hours a day, 7 days a week: roughly $3,600-$4,200 per month
• 8 hours a day: roughly $7,200-$8,400 per month
• Around-the-clock care: $13,000+ per month — more than most nursing homes

The crossover point matters: once a parent needs more than about 8-10 hours of daily supervision, facility care often delivers more care for less money. For a deeper look at hourly pricing, see how much home care costs per hour.

Adult day care is the budget option almost nobody knows about — supervised daytime care in a center, typically priced by the day at a fraction of facility rates. It covers working caregivers' hours but nothing overnight.

Assisted living is priced monthly, generally below nursing home levels, with tiered add-ons for care levels. Memory care units — secured dementia floors — price above standard assisted living. It is almost entirely private pay: Medicare contributes nothing, and Medicaid coverage of assisted living is limited and state-dependent. See assisted living costs per month.

Nursing homes sit at the top: $8,000 to $9,500 or more per month in most US markets — over $100,000 a year — with private rooms above semi-private. See nursing home cost per month.

What a Full Care Journey Costs

Care needs escalate. A common arc: a year of part-time home care ($40,000), two years of assisted living ($110,000+), eighteen months of memory care or nursing home ($150,000+). That is a $300,000 journey — and it is why "we'll just pay for it" works until it does not. Against these numbers, the long-term care insurance premium a parent paid for 20 years often turns out to have been the cheapest money the family ever spent.

What Each Payer Covers

• Medicare: short-term skilled care only — up to 100 days of skilled nursing facility care per benefit period after a qualifying three-day hospital stay, with full coverage only for the first 20 days. Zero coverage for custodial care in any setting, at home or otherwise.
• Medicaid: the backstop once assets are spent down — typically to about $2,000 in countable assets for a single applicant, with income caps near $2,982/month in many states (2026) and a 60-month look-back on transfers. Strong nursing home coverage; home and assisted living coverage varies by state waiver.
• Long-term care insurance: pays a defined daily or monthly benefit across the settings the contract covers — home care, assisted living, memory care, nursing home — once benefit triggers are certified and the elimination period is satisfied.
• VA Aid and Attendance: pension supplements for wartime veterans and surviving spouses that offset care costs in any setting, documented through VA Form 21-2680.

Outside the US

In Canada, nursing and medical care in facilities is publicly funded, but room and board are privatized — every province except Nunavut charges means-tested resident co-payments, so families still face real monthly costs. In the UK, the NHS covers medical care but local-authority social care is means-tested on assets and income; families often end up arguing that a parent's needs are primarily medical (free NHS Continuing Healthcare) rather than social (spend-down territory). Neither system has a meaningful private long-term care insurance market — the safety net is the state, plus family caregiving.

The Bottom Line

Plan in ranges, not averages: $30-$35 an hour at home, a few thousand a month for assisted living, $8,000-$9,500+ for a nursing home — and a multi-year journey that can total $300,000. Then match each phase to its payer before the phase arrives.

If a long-term care insurance policy is part of your family's equation, the Understanding Long-Term Care Insurance toolkit helps you audit exactly what it pays in each of these settings — benefit caps, provider rules, elimination-period math — so you can build a cost plan around real numbers instead of guesses.