Long-Term Care Cost Statistics (2026)

The national median for a private nursing home room was $355 a day, or $129,575 a year, in 2025. A semi-private room was $315 a day, or $114,975.

Assisted living was $6,200 a month, or $74,400 a year, and it rose 5% on the year, faster than either nursing home category.

Adult day health care was $95 a day, and it was the one category that fell, down 5% from $100.

A non-medical caregiver cost a median of $35 an hour in 2025. At 44 hours a week for 52 weeks, that is $80,080 a year, above assisted living.

Skilled nursing in the home was $90 an hour, so any care requiring a nurse rather than an aide moves into a different order of magnitude very quickly.

Home care is cheaper at part-time hours and more expensive at full-time ones, which is the crossover most families discover after the arrangement is already in place.

Someone turning 65 today has almost a 70% chance of needing some long-term care in their remaining years.

The average duration is about three years, but the average conceals the shape: one-third of today's 65-year-olds may never need care at all, while 20% will need it for more than five years.

Women need care longer than men, 3.7 years against 2.2, which is the single largest reason long-term care planning falls unevenly on women both as recipients and as providers.

65% of people use some care at home and 59% receive unpaid care only, mostly from family.

That unpaid care is the largest form of long-term care in the country and it costs nothing in any national accounting, because nobody is billed for it.

Its real cost lands as lost earnings and interrupted retirement saving for the person providing it, which is why the caregiving and the cost-of-care questions are the same question seen from two sides.

Of the $219.9 billion the US spent on nursing care facilities and continuing care retirement communities in 2024, Medicaid paid $78.9 billion, or 35.9%.

Households paid $48.7 billion out of pocket, 22.1%. Medicare paid $47.3 billion, 21.5%.

Private health insurance paid $19.3 billion, or 8.8%. This is the number that reframes the whole subject: the private market covers under a tenth of the bill, and the public programme designed for low-income households covers over a third.

Medicare paid $47.3 billion toward nursing facility care in 2024, which sounds substantial and is doing a different job than most people expect.

Medicare covers skilled nursing on a short-term, post-hospital basis. It is rehabilitation coverage, not custodial care coverage.

Custodial care, the help with daily activities that most long-term care actually consists of, is outside what Medicare pays for, which is precisely the gap that leaves households and Medicaid holding the bill.

Medicaid is means-tested, so it generally becomes available only after assets have been spent down to a low threshold that varies by state.

That makes the default American long-term care plan an implicit one: pay privately until the money is gone, then qualify.

It is worth naming plainly, because it is the outcome by far the largest number of people end up in, and it is rarely the outcome anyone chose.

At $129,575 a year, five years of private nursing home care is roughly $648,000 before any inflation, and 20% of 65-year-olds will need care for more than five years.

Saving that separately, in cash, on top of a retirement fund is out of reach for most households, which is the structural reason the risk is usually transferred or absorbed rather than pre-funded.

The three real options are insurance, family provision or the Medicaid path, and the decision is which combination rather than whether.

8.8% is a remarkably low share for a risk this large, and it reflects a market that has repriced sharply after early policies were underpriced.

The product is also difficult to buy well: premiums are not guaranteed level in many older policies, benefit triggers are specific, and coverage bought too late is expensive or unavailable.

Hybrid life and long-term care policies exist partly because the standalone product became hard to sell, and they trade a lower long-term care benefit for the certainty that the premium buys something either way.

For many households the home is the largest asset and the implicit long-term care reserve, which is workable and worth being explicit about.

A move to a facility usually frees the house, and that timing is what makes home equity a genuine funding source rather than a theoretical one.

Where one spouse needs care and the other stays in the home, the picture is different: the asset cannot be sold, and Medicaid's rules around a community spouse become the relevant detail rather than the equity figure.

Long-term care decisions are frequently made in a hospital discharge conversation with days to decide, which is the worst possible setting for a six-figure commitment.

The cheapest useful preparation is knowing the local numbers rather than the national ones, since the same private room ranges enormously by state.

The second is having the conversation about which assets are available and who would provide care, before the discharge planner asks.

Cost figures are from the CareScout Cost of Care Survey 2025, which CareScout has conducted for over 20 years and which included 4,425 completed nursing home surveys across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They are its own survey figures, not government statistics.

The probability and duration figures are from the HHS Administration for Community Living's LongTermCare.gov.

Spending and payer shares are from the CMS National Health Expenditure Accounts for 2024. Percentage shares are our arithmetic on the CMS dollar figures.