Home Instead (now Home Instead, an Honor Company) is one of the two largest non-medical home care franchise networks in the United States, and like its main rival it does not publish a single national price. Its corporate cost page says so directly: “Rates for each local Home Instead franchise office vary. Please reach out to your local Home Instead to get a cost estimate.”
So the useful answer is a range assembled from the offices that do post numbers, plus the national medians that tell you whether a local quote is reasonable. Everything below was pulled from Home Instead’s own pages in September 2026, and where the company’s own figures disagree with each other, this guide says so instead of picking the friendlier one.
What Does Home Instead Cost Without Insurance?
Two Home Instead offices publish real rate cards. The office serving Houston breaks its market down by care level. The San Luis Obispo, California office publishes both a traditional hourly rate and a low-commitment starter plan. The corporate site publishes only a national monthly estimate that it attributes to the Genworth Cost of Care Survey.
| Program or schedule | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly rate, offices that publish it | $28 | $30-$35 | $55 |
| Companionship care, per hour (Houston) | $28 | n/a | $30 |
| Personal care, per hour (Houston) | $30 | n/a | $32 |
| Specialized dementia care, per hour (Houston) | $32 | n/a | $35 |
| Traditional hourly care, per hour (San Luis Obispo, CA) | $42 | n/a | $55 |
| Starter plan, per month, 4 hours included (San Luis Obispo) | $180 | n/a | $180 + $45/extra hour |
| 10 hours a week, per month (Houston) | $1,200 | n/a | $1,400 |
| 20 hours a week, per month | $2,400 | $2,425-$2,800 | $4,765 |
| 40 hours a week, per month | $4,800 | $4,800-$5,600 | $9,530 |
| Full-time, around-the-clock, per month (Houston) | $8,000 | n/a | $10,000 |
| Home Instead national estimate, 20-44 hours a week, per month | $2,253 | n/a | $4,957 |
| National non-medical caregiver median (CareScout 2025) | n/a | $35/hour | n/a |
The monthly rows built on the $28 to $55 hourly range are arithmetic (hours per week times 4.33 weeks). Everything else is quoted directly from the pages listed in the sources.
The Company’s Own Numbers Disagree, and That Matters
Home Instead’s national page puts one-to-one care at $2,253 to $4,957 a month for 20 to 44 hours a week. Divide either end by the matching hours and you get about $26 an hour.
That is well below the $28 to $55 its own offices post, and below the $35 an hour national median from the 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey, which was fielded July through November 2025 and reported a 3% year-over-year increase. The Nashville office’s page shows the same pattern, estimating $1,421 to $4,004 a month for 16 to 44 hours a week, which implies roughly $21 an hour in Tennessee.
The likely explanation is survey vintage: the corporate estimate is attributed to the Genworth survey, and home care rates have risen every year since. The practical takeaway is simple. Treat the national page as a floor, not a forecast, and budget against the local office’s written quote.
What Drives the Price
Franchise territory. This dominates everything else. The identical service and the identical company ran $28 an hour in Houston and $55 an hour on California’s central coast. Rates follow local caregiver wages, which vary more by metro than by brand.
Care level. Houston’s published tiers separate companionship ($28 to $30), hands-on personal care ($30 to $32) and specialized dementia care ($32 to $35). A dementia diagnosis moves you up a tier even if the tasks look similar.
Minimum shift and weekly commitment. San Luis Obispo requires 8 hours a week for its traditional hourly program; Houston notes that 3 to 4 hour minimum shifts are the norm in that market. A single one-hour visit can bill as three or four hours, so the minimum rule often changes your monthly total more than the hourly rate does.
Nights, weekends and holidays. Off-hours shifts carry premiums at most offices. Get the full rate card in writing, including the holiday list and any overnight or awake-night differential.
Agency overhead versus caregiver wages. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the May 2025 median pay for home health and personal care aides at $17.21 an hour ($35,800 a year) across 4.68 million workers, and projects 18% growth from 2025 to 2035. An agency bill rate roughly double the wage covers payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, background checks, supervision and backup coverage when a caregiver calls out.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Almost none of what Home Instead sells is covered by health insurance, and understanding why saves families from an expensive assumption.
Medicare does not pay for non-medical home care. Medicare.gov excludes 24-hour-a-day care at home, home meal delivery, homemaker services unrelated to your care plan, and custodial or personal care when that is the only care you need. Companion care, help with bathing and dressing, meal prep and dementia supervision all fall inside those exclusions.
Medicare-certified home health costs $0 and is a different service. If a doctor certifies that the person is homebound and needs part-time or intermittent skilled nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy or speech-language pathology, Medicare covers the visits with no cost sharing. You pay 20% only on durable medical equipment after the Part B deductible. Our home health care cost guide explains exactly where that line sits, and it is worth asking the physician about a referral before you buy private-duty hours.
Long-term care insurance is the policy that actually pays. Home Instead offices routinely list LTC insurance among accepted payment sources and many will bill the carrier directly. Check the elimination period, the daily or monthly benefit cap, and whether the policy requires a licensed agency.
Medicaid and VA benefits cover some households. State Medicaid home and community-based services waivers pay for personal care and homemaker services for people who meet the state’s level-of-care and financial tests, and some Home Instead offices contract with Medicaid managed care plans. On the VA side, Aid and Attendance is an add-on to a VA pension: effective December 1, 2025, the Maximum Annual Pension Rate with Aid and Attendance is $29,093 for a veteran with no dependents and $34,488 with one dependent, with a net worth limit of $163,699 through November 30, 2026. Money you pay a caregiver counts as an unreimbursed medical expense that reduces countable income.
How to Pay Less
Collect three written quotes, including the adjacent territory. Franchise pricing is hyper-local. Ask each office for the hourly rate by care level, the minimum shift, the weekly minimum, and the weekend, holiday and overnight premiums. Compare the number against the national median with our fair price checker before you sign anything.
Buy the lowest care tier the person actually needs. If the job is companionship, errands and meals, do not pay the dementia-care rate. Houston’s own published tiers differ by up to $7 an hour for shifts that can look similar on paper.
Ask about a low-commitment starter plan. San Luis Obispo’s alternative program starts at $180 a month for 4 hours with extra hours at $45, which is a cheaper way to test the relationship than committing to a standing weekly schedule.
Consolidate hours into fewer, longer shifts. With a 3 to 4 hour minimum, several short visits bill like a full day. Two four-hour shifts usually cost less than five one-hour drop-ins and give the caregiver time to actually help.
Price alternatives before you scale up hours. At 40 hours a week you are already near the cost of assisted living, and around-the-clock home care at $8,000 to $10,000 a month exceeds it. Compare a live-in caregiver, an adult day program, and a directly hired caregiver from a marketplace like Care.com before committing to full-time agency hours. Our Visiting Angels cost guide covers the other big franchise network if you want a same-city comparison.
Read every invoice line. Mileage, holiday premiums, minimum-visit charges and shift differentials get misapplied. The line-by-line approach in our guide to negotiating medical bills works on home care invoices, and asking for a corrected statement is routine. If a balance has already gone past due, read medical bills in collections before you pay or dispute anything.
The Bottom Line
Plan on $28 to $55 an hour for Home Instead in 2026, with most markets landing in the low $30s and high-cost coastal metros running much higher. Twenty hours a week is roughly $2,425 to $4,765 a month, and full-time coverage runs $4,800 to $9,500.
Home Instead’s own national estimate of $2,253 to $4,957 a month is the friendliest number the company publishes and the least likely to match your quote. Get the local rate card in writing, then check Medicare-certified home health, Medicaid HCBS waivers, VA Aid and Attendance and any long-term care policy before you pay a single hour out of pocket.