Cost guide
Private Nursing Care at Home
Private nursing care at home costs about $90 an hour, or $160 per visit.
That is from the CareScout Cost of Care Survey 2025, published by Genworth in March 2026, and it is roughly two and a half times the $35 an hour a non-medical caregiver costs. The gap is the whole point: these are two different services and families mix them up constantly.
Nurse or caregiver
The names sound almost the same and the rates are not. Getting this right before you call an agency is worth more than any negotiating you will do afterwards.
The rule of thumb is simple. If the task legally requires a licence or a clinical judgement, you need a nurse. If it does not, you are buying an expensive pair of hands.
What it costs on a real schedule
All figures are arithmetic on the same $90 an hour, so treat them as a planning frame rather than a quote. Many agencies price nursing per visit rather than per hour for short clinical tasks, and the $160 visit rate is often the better deal when the work takes under two hours.
Compare that last row with a semi-private nursing home room at $315 a day, about $9,580 a month. Private nursing at home passes a facility at roughly three and a half hours a day. Past four hours a day, the facility is usually cheaper, which is why most families use private duty nursing for specific clinical tasks rather than continuous coverage.
Why Medicare will not cover it
Medicare does cover skilled nursing at home, but not the kind you are pricing here. It covers part-time or intermittent nursing for someone who is homebound under a doctor-ordered plan of care, and Medicare.gov says you pay nothing for covered services. The usual limit is up to 8 hours a day and 28 hours a week combined.
What it does not cover is continuous one-to-one nursing. Medicare.gov states plainly that Medicare does not pay for 24-hour-a-day care at your home. Private duty nursing is by definition the continuous kind, which is exactly why it is private pay.
The full coverage rules, including the homebound test and what the benefit excludes, are on our Medicare home health page.
Who does pay
- Private funds. The usual answer, and the reason the hours matter so much.
- Medicaid waivers. Some state home and community based services waivers fund private duty nursing for people with high clinical need, particularly ventilator dependence. Rules are set state by state.
- Long-term care insurance. Check whether the policy pays for skilled nursing at home and at what daily cap.
- VA Aid and Attendance. For qualifying wartime veterans and surviving spouses.
Where Call Mabel fits
Call Mabel is not nursing and not care. It cannot give a medication, assess a wound, or notice a clinical change. If your parent needs a nurse, nothing on this site is a substitute for one, and this page exists to help you price the real thing rather than to sell around it.
A daily call sits alongside clinical care, not instead of it. Where families find it useful is the ordinary days between visits: someone talks to their mother, and they hear about it if a call goes unanswered or something sounds different. If what you actually need is help with daily life rather than clinical work, the honest comparison is non-medical home care at $35 an hour.
Sources
- CareScout Cost of Care Survey 2025, published by Genworth Financial, 2 March 2026. Skilled nursing in the home $90 an hour or $160 a visit; non-medical caregiver $35 an hour; nursing home semi-private room $315 a day and $114,975 a year.
- Medicare.gov, “Home health services” coverage page, for the part-time and intermittent limits of 8 hours a day and 28 hours a week combined, the statement that you pay nothing for covered services, and the exclusion of 24-hour-a-day care at home.
Published 2026-08-21. National medians that change yearly; check the current CareScout survey before relying on a figure. General information about what care costs, not medical, legal or financial advice. Decisions about clinical care belong with your parent’s doctor.