Our home health aide care is $45 an hour, from one to eight hours a day, with no minimum contract and no assessment fee. Four hours a day works out to about $5,460 a month. A semi private room in a Massachusetts nursing home ran about $15,300 a month in mid 2026 by one national cost survey, which is well above the national median.

Divide one by the other and you get the number families actually want: home care stays cheaper than a nursing home until you need roughly 11 hours of help a day.

What are the rates?

• Home health aide care, $45 an hour, one to eight hours a day.
• Overnight, $540 for a 12 hour night.
• Around the clock, $1,080 a day.
• Wheelchair transportation, $115 each way or $230 round trip within five miles of an office, then $2 a mile.
• Stair assistance, $200 a visit, which is two trained staff and a motorized stair chair.

No minimum contract means no minimum. Most agencies in Massachusetts require a four hour minimum visit and many require twenty hours a week before they will take you. If three hours on a Tuesday is what you need, that is $135 and we will do it.

What does that come to in a month?

• Three hours twice a week, about $1,170
• Two hours a day, about $2,730
• Three hours a day, about $4,095
• Four hours a day, about $5,460
• Six hours a day, about $8,200
• Eight hours a day, about $10,900
• Every night, 12 hours, about $16,200
• Around the clock, about $32,800

Those use a 30 day month. A long month costs slightly more, and if you want the exact figure for a specific schedule we will work it out on the phone rather than making you reverse engineer it.

So when does a facility become the cheaper answer?

Around the clock care at home is roughly double a nursing home, and it is not close. Every night of overnight coverage is already above it. Eight hours a day sits just under. Below six hours a day it is not a contest.

We would rather tell you that than sell you 24 hour care you cannot sustain. Families who start at around the clock coverage usually run out of money in under a year, and the move happens anyway, from a worse position. If what your mother needs is genuinely constant supervision and two person transfers, price a facility honestly and compare.

What is actually included in the hourly rate?

The aide's time doing personal care and the tasks around it: bathing, dressing, grooming, toileting, transfers, mobility, meals, light housekeeping, laundry, companionship, and being present for appointments. Our staff are trained, background checked and insured, and every visit is logged in MyCase, our own coordination system, so you can see that somebody came and when.

There is no assessment fee, no sign up fee and no charge for setting up the schedule.

What is not included?

• Nursing. Our aides are not nurses and cannot administer medication. They can be present while a client takes their own, help if something goes wrong, and call for help. Skilled nursing is a separate service, priced separately.
• Transportation. The van is its own line, priced above. An aide riding along with you is aide time.
• Stair assistance. Also its own visit, because it takes two staff and equipment.
• Supplies. Incontinence products, wipes, gloves and groceries are yours.

Will insurance pay any of it?

Medicare does not pay for an aide in the house on an ongoing basis. It covers a nurse or therapist for a limited period after a hospital stay when a doctor orders it and the person is homebound. Day to day help with bathing and dressing is custodial care and has never been a Medicare benefit.

A long term care policy may pay, and most of them reimburse you rather than paying us, after an elimination period you fund yourself. That is worth understanding before you file, and we walk through it on how to make a long term care policy actually pay for a home aide. Veterans and surviving spouses should ask about Aid and Attendance. Some Medicare Advantage plans now include a small in home support allowance, which is worth one phone call.

What should we try before paying anything?

Three things, and we would rather you check them than overpay us.

• Your local Aging Services Access Point. The state funded home care program is income based and the ASAP for your town decides. If money is tight, call them first.
• The Council on Aging. Most towns run free or cheap rides, meals and some respite. It will not cover personal care, but it reduces what you have to buy.
• MassHealth PCA hours, if the person needs physical help with at least two daily activities and is on MassHealth Standard or CommonHealth. Those hours cost the family nothing, though you do the hiring.

How do we start, and how small can we start?

One visit. Three hours on one day is a perfectly normal way to begin, and it is often the right way, because the person receiving care gets to meet one aide and do one short visit before agreeing to a routine. You can add days later without renegotiating anything.

Care Remedy serves eastern and central Massachusetts from offices in Woburn, Brockton and Springfield. Call 781-957-8076 and tell us the days and hours you are thinking about, and we will quote it on the call.

Facility cost figures are third party median estimates for Massachusetts as of mid 2026 and vary widely by community. Our own rates are current as published here.