Ask most families paying for their own home care what capital the council would count against them, and they’ll describe care home rules — because that’s the version everyone’s heard of. Home care is assessed differently, and for a lot of families the difference is worth more than the headline threshold figures suggest.
The numbers everyone quotes
For 2026/27, the capital thresholds are £23,250 and £14,250. Above £23,250 in assessable savings and capital, you’re generally a full self-funder. Below £14,250, none of your capital counts towards your contribution at all. In between, it’s a sliding scale — the more you have, the more you’re assessed to contribute, up to the maximum the council decides your care costs. These figures apply whether you’re looking at home care or a care home, so they’re the ones that get repeated everywhere.
What gets missed far more often is what these thresholds are actually measured against — and that’s where home care and residential care genuinely part ways.
Why your house doesn’t count
If you go into a care home, your property can end up counted as capital after a 12-week disregard period, unless someone specific still lives there (a partner, for instance). That rule is well known, mostly because it’s the one people worry about most.
Home care doesn’t work that way. If you’re being cared for in your own home, the value of that home is excluded from the financial assessment entirely, regardless of what it’s worth, for as long as you’re living in it. There’s no 12-week countdown, because the situation the disregard exists to handle — someone moving permanently into residential care — hasn’t happened. You’re still there. The council assesses your savings, investments, and other capital, but your home itself isn’t part of that calculation.
This is the single most common thing families get wrong when they’re weighing up home care against a care home, usually because they’ve researched one and assumed the same rules apply to the other. For anyone choosing live-in or domiciliary support specifically because they want to stay in their own home, it’s worth knowing that decision doesn’t put the home itself on the table financially, either.
What does get counted
Savings and current accounts, ISAs, stocks and shares, premium bonds, and a second property or land you own but don’t live in all count as capital. If you jointly own savings or investments with someone else, your assessed share is generally counted rather than the whole amount. Regular income — pensions, benefits, rental income if you have a second property — is assessed separately from capital, against the amount the council has agreed to pay for your care.
What doesn’t count: personal possessions, and — as above — your own home, provided you’re living in it.
There’s no ceiling on what you might pay
It’s worth being direct about this, because it surprises people who half-remember a policy that never actually arrived: there is no lifetime cap on care costs. A cap of £86,000 was proposed, delayed more than once, and ultimately scrapped by the government rather than introduced. If you’re a self-funder, you keep paying the full cost of your care for as long as you need it and your capital sits above the threshold — there’s no point at which the state automatically steps in because you’ve paid “enough” over your lifetime. Planning on the assumption that a cap exists, even informally, is planning against a rule that doesn’t exist.
The one number that just moved in your favour
If you do end up receiving council-funded support and contributing towards it, the Minimum Income Guarantee is the weekly amount you’re protected from losing to care charges, whatever your capital position. For 2026/27, it rose by 7% for working-age adults (18 to 65) — above inflation — while pension-age recipients saw a 3.8% increase, in line with inflation. In practical terms, a single adult aged 25 to pension age is now guaranteed at least £120.40 a week after care charges, and a single pension-age adult at least £241.45, with an additional £51.55 a week disability premium for those who qualify. It’s a smaller, quieter change than the headline thresholds, but a genuine one, and one that specifically favours working-age adults with care needs this year.
Talk it through
None of this replaces a proper financial assessment, and we’re not financial advisers — for anything with real money attached, it’s worth talking to an independent adviser who specialises in care funding alongside whatever the council tells you. What we can do is help you understand how these rules apply to your specific situation before you’re sitting across from an assessor working it out for the first time. Get in touch if that would help.
Dave Drury, Registered Manager, Daisy Homecare