The Datum Report

Occupation 6135 · Caring, leisure and other service occupations

Care workers and home carers

Half of full-time care workers and home carers in the UK earn more than £27,468 a year, and half earn less.

Care workers and home carers attend to the personal needs and comforts of children, the elderly, the infirm and others with care and support needs (‘service users’) within residential care establishments, day care establishments or in their own homes.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements. In most cases workers will be required to register with the appropriate statutory body which involves satisfying the registration criteria. This would normally include holding or working towards the appropriate qualification for the job. Entrants must typically be 18 years old and have experience of working in a care environment. Both Off and on-the-job training is available. A wide range of qualifications including NVQs/SVQs covering various aspects of care are available. Background checks including a DBS check are likely to be required.

What the work involves

• assists and enables service users to dress, undress, wash, use the toilet and bathe
• serves meals to service users at table or in bed, and assists with feeding if required
• assists with service users’ overall comfort and wellbeing
• provides interest and activities to stimulate and engage the service user
• helps with daily activities such as letter writing, paying bills, collecting benefits
• undertakes light cleaning and domestic duties including meal preparation as required
• monitors service users’ conditions by taking temperature, pulse, respiration and weight, and contributes to record keeping
• liaises with professional staff in carrying out care plans etc.

Also called

Care assistant · Carer · Child care worker · Home care assistant · Home carer · Support worker (nursing home)

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for care workers and home carers, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 11 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Ambulance staff (excluding paramedics) · Care escorts · Dental nurses · Houseparents and residential wardens · Nursing auxiliaries and assistants · Senior care workers · Undertakers, mortuary and crematorium assistants