The Homecare Association’s own calculation for a legally compliant, sustainable hourly rate of home care in England is £34.42 this year. If a quote you’re comparing sits noticeably below that, the right question isn’t “how soon can you start” — it’s “what’s not in this price.”
What goes into an hour of care
£34.42 an hour isn’t a number someone picked to sound reasonable. It’s built up from the National Living Wage floor of £12.71 an hour that came into force this April, plus employer National Insurance and pension contributions on top of that wage, paid travel time between visits, mileage, ongoing training, supervision, and a minimum contribution towards running a compliant, quality-checked business rather than a bare-bones one. That figure rose from £32.14 the year before, tracking the wage increase directly — it isn’t inflation padding, it’s the same calculation run again with this year’s numbers.
Every one of those cost lines is optional to skip and legal to skip, right up until it isn’t. A provider can pay the wage floor and simply not pay for the minutes spent driving between clients. They can run fewer supervision visits than they should. None of that shows up in a headline rate, which is exactly why it needs asking about directly rather than assumed.
Where Hampshire sits right now
Rates have moved since anyone last checked six months ago, and they’ve moved in one direction: up, tracking the April 2026 wage rise. Nationally, home care now runs £26 to £38 an hour depending on region, with the UK average around £32. Hampshire and Portsmouth sit close to that national average rather than below it — recent figures put the local average at roughly £32 an hour, not the mid-£20s some older guides still quote.
The more useful comparison is what named providers publish. Helping Hands, who operate across Portsmouth, list visiting care from £32.40 an hour plus a separate £4.50 travel charge per visit — so the real cost of a typical call runs above the headline figure once that’s added, not hidden inside it. Home Instead don’t publish a flat hourly rate, but their own worked examples imply one: a client having 7 hours a week of personal care pays £231 a week, which works out at £33 an hour; a client with 14 hours a week of specialist dementia support pays £490 a week, working out at £35. Both sit close to or above the Homecare Association’s £34.42 sustainable minimum, not meaningfully below it.
That’s a different picture from six months ago, and worth knowing before you compare quotes: the established providers active in this area aren’t the ones pricing well under the sustainable line. If something comes in noticeably below £30 an hour, especially with no separate travel charge mentioned anywhere, that’s the quote worth asking harder questions about.
What to ask
Ask directly whether travel time between visits is paid, and whether it’s itemised separately (like Helping Hands’ £4.50-per-visit charge) or supposedly baked into the headline rate — unpaid or unmentioned travel time is one of the most common ways a provider’s real hourly cost gets hidden. Ask what’s included in the headline figure and what isn’t — weekend loading, bank holiday rates, and evening calls are common places for a lower quote to turn into a higher bill later. And ask how the provider arrived at their price at all. One that can walk you through it, even roughly, against something like the Homecare Association’s own calculation, is being straight with you. One that can’t, or won’t, is telling you something too.
How we price it
That’s exactly the kind of breakdown we’re happy to walk you through directly, rather than publishing a generic headline rate that would need caveats and exclusions attached to mean anything. If you want to talk through what a realistic budget looks like for your situation, whether you’re self-funding or working with a direct payment, get in touch — we’ll go through it the same way, line by line.
Dave Drury, Registered Manager, Daisy Homecare