Often, yes. But probably not the way you are currently imagining it, and the reason is a distinction almost nobody explains to families at the start.

With most conditions you are buying help with tasks. Someone needs a shower, a meal, a ride. You buy the hours those tasks take and you go home.

With Alzheimer's you are eventually buying presence . Somebody has to be in the house, awake and paying attention, whether or not anything needs doing. That is a completely different cost structure, and families who budget for the first thing get badly caught out by the second.



Here is the arithmetic, honestly, including the parts that argue against hiring us.

Our rates

$45 an hour for one to eight hours a day. $35 an hour for twenty four hour care. Those are the two numbers everything below is built from.

What it costs by stage

Nobody moves through this on a schedule and stages blur. But the cost pattern is consistent enough to plan against.

Early: the cheap years, and the ones people waste

Your mother is safe alone. She forgets appointments, repeats herself, struggles with the bills and the stove. What she needs is a few hours of structure: someone for medications, meals, laundry, a shower, and company.

Four hours a day, three days a week is twelve hours, $540 a week, roughly $2,300 a month. Most families can carry that, and it is also when introducing an aide is easiest, because she can still get to know a person and remember them. Families who wait until the crisis are introducing a stranger to someone who no longer forms new memories, which is far harder on everybody.

Middle: where the money actually goes

She cannot safely be alone for a full day. Maybe she has walked out of the house, or left a burner on, or become frightened in the late afternoon. The need has quietly changed from help to supervision, and it is the longest stage, often several years.

Eight hours a day, five days is $1,800 a week, about $7,800 a month. Seven days is roughly $10,900. This is where budgets break.

Late: continuous

Twenty four hour care at $35 is $5,880 a week, roughly $25,500 a month, about $306,000 a year. For comparison, the CareScout 2025 survey put the national median for a private nursing home room at about $10,798 a month. Around the clock private pay care at home is roughly two and a half times that.

Some families do it anyway, for months or years, and it is a legitimate choice when someone has said clearly they want to die at home. But it is the most expensive option in long term care and you should walk into it with open eyes rather than drift into it a week at a time.

The single biggest saving, and it is not us

If you read nothing else, read this.



Adult day health programs ran a 2025 national median of $95 a day . That typically buys eight or nine hours of supervised care, meals, activities and other people to talk to. Work out the hourly equivalent and it is around twelve dollars an hour.

The same eight hours at our rate is $360.

Five days a week of adult day health is roughly $2,000 a month. Five days a week of eight hour aide coverage at home is about $7,800. For the middle stage, when what you need is daytime supervision and the person is safe overnight, adult day health is often close to a quarter of the cost of the equivalent at home, and many people with dementia do better there, because the structure and the company are genuinely good for them.

We are a home care agency telling you to look hard at adult day health first. We mean it. The families who keep a parent at home longest are usually the ones who used day programs for the bulk of the supervision and bought aide hours only for the edges: the morning, the evening, the weekend, the appointment.

Not everyone tolerates a day program, and some refuse outright. But try it before you conclude it will not work, and give it more than one visit.

The phone call to make first

Massachusetts has 23 regional Aging Services Access Points, the ASAPs. They do in home assessments, build care plans, coordinate home care services and caregiver support, and provide information and referral for free.

The way in is MassOptions at 1-800-243-4636 , staffed by trained specialists with support in more than a hundred languages. They will connect you to your regional ASAP.

Make that call before you call any private agency, including us. An ASAP assessment is free, it establishes what your parent qualifies for, and it opens doors to state programs you will not find on your own. Massachusetts also runs several routes worth asking about by name: the Home Care Program, the Frail Elder Waiver, the Personal Care Attendant program for MassHealth Standard and CommonHealth members, and Adult Foster Care. Ask the ASAP which of those apply, because the eligibility rules differ and no website will sort it out for you as well as an assessor will.

Ask one more question while you have them: whether a family member can be paid to provide care. Massachusetts has more than one route where that is possible, the rules differ by program and by relationship, and it changes the arithmetic completely for a family where somebody has already left work.

What Medicare will not do

Original Medicare does not pay for long term custodial care, which is what dementia care mostly is. It covers skilled care after a qualifying hospital stay, and home health physical or occupational therapy, but not an aide sitting with your mother so she does not leave the house.

A Medicare Advantage plan is a different question and worth ten minutes. Call the number on the back of the card and ask what in home supports, adult day benefit, respite and transportation the plan includes. Plans vary enormously and most members never ask.

If your parent's money will eventually run out, talk to an elder law attorney early rather than late. MassHealth long term care eligibility has look back rules, and decisions made in a panic at the end are usually worse and sometimes irreversible.

Where the hours are worth most



If your budget is limited, and everyone's is, spend it where it does the most good rather than spreading it thin.



• The late afternoon and early evening. If there is agitation as the light goes, that window is the hardest part of a family caregiver's day and the most likely thing to break them. Covering four in the afternoon to eight in the evening does more than covering a quiet morning.
• Bathing. Refusing a shower is the most common flashpoint in dementia care and the one adult children find hardest, particularly a son with his mother or a daughter with her father. A trained aide who does this daily gets it done with less distress and less argument. Buying nothing but two shower visits a week is a real and sensible arrangement.
• Whatever lets the main caregiver sleep. Sleep loss is what ends home care more often than money does. If the nights are broken, overnight coverage two nights a week is worth more than daytime hours.
• Appointments. These eat a working person's leave faster than anything else. Six or seven medical visits a month is common and it is often the reason an adult child ends up leaving a job.

The stairs problem, which arrives without warning

One thing dementia families are rarely warned about: the point at which a parent stops managing the staircase, and every appointment becomes a problem before it becomes a journey.

A ride service, however good, starts at the curb. Getting somebody from a second floor bedroom, down the stairs and out of a front door is a separate trained two person job. We do that part, and we mention it because families often assume it is included somewhere and it usually is not. If the bedroom is upstairs and the stairs are becoming difficult, start thinking now about whether the bed can move to the ground floor, because it is much easier to arrange before it is urgent.

A word about the guilt



Most people who call us have been managing alone for months longer than they should have, and they open by apologizing or by explaining why they have not done more. You do not owe us that, and you do not owe it to anyone else either.



Bringing in help is not a failure of love and it is not the beginning of the end. Twelve to sixteen hours a week of coverage, plus a day program, plus somebody else handling the appointments, is very often the difference between a parent staying home for another two years and a placement that happens next month because the family simply ran out.

Start here



Call MassOptions at 1-800-243-4636 and ask for an ASAP assessment. Ask about adult day health in your town. Ask whether a family member can be paid. Call the Medicare Advantage plan if there is one.



Then call us and tell us which hours are hardest, and we will tell you what covering just those costs.

Care Remedy provides home health aide care, wheelchair transportation and stair assistance across eastern and central Massachusetts, from offices in Woburn, Springfield and Brockton. Call 781-957-8076.

Our rates are current as of publication and subject to change. Transportation and stair assistance are quoted separately. National median costs for adult day health, nursing homes and caregivers are from the CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey and are national rather than Massachusetts figures; Massachusetts generally runs higher. ASAP and MassOptions details are from Mass.gov. Program eligibility changes; confirm current rules with MassOptions or your ASAP. This is general information and not medical, financial or legal advice.