Occupation / job
Home Health and Personal Care Aides
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Home Health and Personal Care Aides pays $35,800 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $14,220 a year short, or $6.83 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.
At 4,305,810 workers, Home Health and Personal Care Aides is one of the largest occupations in the country. Jobs at this scale are the labour market’s floor — always hiring, rarely bidding, and first to absorb people leaving somewhere else.
Aide and nursing assistant work suits people who can do physically heavy, intimate care with patience, and who understand that the relationship with the patient is most of what the job actually is.
How long it takes to become one of the 4,305,810 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $31,920 and $39,470, $629 a month apart at a ratio of 1.2x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.
The bottom quarter is under $31,920, $18,100 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Home Health and Personal Care Aides is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if your back or knees are already a concern — the lifting is real and it does not become someone else’s job with seniority.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 4,305,810 figure counts people already working as Home Health and Personal Care Aides, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.2x between $31,920 and $39,470, this is a narrow distribution. $35,800 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.
The middle half of this field earns between $31,920 and $39,470. That is $7,550 of range, with $35,800 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $39,470, the 75th percentile, is worth $3,670 a year more than the $35,800 midpoint and $7,550 more than the $31,920 a quarter of Home Health and Personal Care Aides settle for.
The fall from $35,800 to the $31,920 bottom quarter is $3,880; the climb to the $39,470 top quarter is $3,670. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Home Health and Personal Care Aides is $17.21 an hour. The quarters sit at $15.34 and $18.97, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $35,800 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Home Health and Personal Care Aides, the hourly figure is $35,800 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else