Weekend Only Home Care in Massachusetts

Yes, you can book Saturday and Sunday only. We have no minimum contract, no assessment fee and no four hour minimum per visit, so a weekend block can be as short as the need actually is. Three hours on each weekend day runs about $1,170 a month.

Can I hire an aide for Saturday and Sunday only?

You can, and it is one of the most common schedules families ask us for. The pattern is almost always the same: an adult child or a spouse covers Monday through Friday around a job, and the weekend is when that person has to sleep, see their own family, or leave the state for two days.

Weekend only also works as a trial run. If a parent has refused help for a year, two Saturday mornings is a smaller thing to agree to than a daily aide, and it gives everyone real information before a bigger schedule gets built.

How much does weekend only home care cost?

Home health aide care is $45 an hour, one to eight hours a day, and that is the rate on a Saturday the same as on a Tuesday. Two weekend days at three hours each is the figure at the top of this page. Shorter weekend visits cost proportionally less, because there is no minimum visit length to pad out.

For how weekend hours compare with a daily or a monthly schedule, see home care cost in Massachusetts per hour and per month, and the fees that sit beyond an hourly rate if you are comparing quotes.

Why do some agencies turn down a weekend only schedule?

Because weekend shifts are the hardest shifts to staff, and the usual answers to that problem land on the client. Three structural limits to ask any agency about before you sign:

• A higher weekend or holiday rate, because the agency pays its own staff a weekend differential and passes it on
• A weekly hours minimum, often twenty hours or more, which a two day schedule cannot reach
• A rule that weekend coverage is only added onto an existing weekday schedule, so weekend only is refused outright

Ask for the weekend rate and the weekly minimum in writing. If an agency will not publish either one, that is your answer.

Will it be the same aide every weekend?

That is the right question to ask, and no honest agency will promise one person forever. What we do is assign a regular aide to the schedule and a named backup for the weeks that person is out, so the house is not meeting a stranger at eight on a Saturday morning.

Visits are logged in MyCase, our own coordination platform. A family member who is three hours away on Saturday can see that the aide arrived, and a missed shift is visible rather than something you find out about on Monday.

What can a weekend aide do, and what can they not do?

An aide can help with bathing, dressing, toileting and transfers, make meals, do laundry and light housekeeping, change the bed, walk with the client, and go along to the store. They can be present while the client takes their own medication, help if something goes wrong, and call for help.

Our aides are trained, background checked and insured. They are not nurses. They do not administer medication, including insulin, they do not change dressings, and they do not make clinical judgments. If the weekend need is a clinical one, that is skilled nursing, which is a separate service and priced separately. Say so plainly when you call, because the wrong service on a Saturday is the one that fails.

What if I need the whole weekend covered, not a few hours?

Overnight coverage is $540 for a twelve hour night, and around the clock coverage is $1,080 a day. A family going away from Friday night to Sunday evening usually wants one of those two rather than a string of hourly visits, and the arithmetic is worth doing before you book, because a full weekend of continuous coverage is a different order of cost from a few hours of help.

If the real need is a whole week rather than a weekend, respite care for a week and what it costs is the page you want instead.

Is there a cheaper way to get the weekend off?

Often, and you should try these first:

• Call the Council on Aging in your parent's town. Some run weekend check in calls, volunteer visitor programs and friendly caller services at no charge
• Ask your Aging Services Access Point whether the household qualifies for state funded respite hours. If it does, those hours cost you nothing and should be used before private pay
• If your parent has MassHealth and needs hands on help with daily tasks, the PCA program may authorize paid hours, and those hours can be scheduled on weekends
• If the need is company rather than care, a rotation among three family members on alternating weekends costs nothing and usually holds longer than one person doing every weekend

If none of that covers the weekend, or if the help has to be reliable rather than voluntary, that is when paying for it makes sense. If you only need a short stretch on one or two days, hiring a caregiver for a few hours a day covers the shorter visit question.

How do I start?

Call 781 957 8076 or email info@careremedyinc.com with the town, the two days you need, and the hours. We serve eastern and central Massachusetts from offices in Woburn, Brockton and Springfield.

Eligibility rules for publicly funded hours change. Confirm what your household qualifies for with your Aging Services Access Point or MassHealth, and talk to your parent's doctor about anything clinical.