What a Home Care Agency Is Worth in 2026, and Who Decides

Ask your accountant what your agency is worth and you will get a multiple of last year's profit. Ask someone who buys these businesses and you will get a question back first: how many hours a week are you delivering, and how many of them will still be running six months after you have handed over.

Home care agencies in England change hands at between two and seven times adjusted earnings. The multiple is a judgement about how likely the profit is to carry on without you, and buyers form that judgement from your hours, your funding mix, your carers and your office long before anyone opens the management accounts.

There is no building in this business, so what you are selling is a pattern of delivered hours and the team that produces them.

01—The Hours

What a Buyer Counts First

There is no building in this business, which means there is no property sitting underneath the trading figures to hold the price up if the trading falls away. What you are selling is a pattern of delivered hours and the team that produces them, so that is where a buyer starts.

The first thing a serious buyer asks for is a weekly record of delivered hours going back eighteen months or two years, broken down by who pays for them. They read three things from it at once: the volume, which tells them the size of the business; the trend, which tells them whether it is growing, holding or slowly shrinking; and how steady the hours are week to week, which tells them whether the total rests on long-running packages or on short ones that could end with a single call from a commissioner.

Owners are often surprised by how little attention goes to the number of clients. Fifty clients on thirty-minute visits and twenty clients on longer packages can produce similar turnover with very different costs, because travel time, how tightly the rota is packed and how many of your carers' paid hours are spent with clients all sit in the detail. Buyers know this, and they will rebuild your rota to see what your care actually costs to deliver before they settle on what your profit really is.

If the thing that makes the rota work is you, a buyer is buying a client list and a staff list rather than a business that runs.

02—The Profit

What the Profit Figure Actually Is

Most agencies we speak to are owned and run by the same person, and that changes how the profit is worked out before any multiple is applied. A buyer takes the profit in your accounts, adds back what you pay yourself and any personal or one-off costs that will not continue, and then takes off what it would cost to employ a manager to do your job. The figure left at the end is the one the multiple is applied to.

As an example, take an agency showing £120,000 of profit where the owner draws £60,000 a year and runs the office. Adding back the owner's pay gives £180,000. A registered manager to replace the owner might cost £45,000 with employment costs, which leaves £135,000 of adjusted earnings. In the middle of the range, at 3.5 to 5 times, that agency would be valued at between £472,500 and £675,000. The same agency with a manager already in post, a settled team and a good share of private clients could reasonably be discussed in the upper range, at between £675,000 and £945,000 on the same earnings.

The worked example also shows why two owners with the same accounts can be given very different numbers, and why buyers go through the adjustments line by line. Every add-back you can evidence with a payslip or an invoice will be accepted, and every one you cannot will be argued over.

03—The Multiple

What Moves the Multiple Up and Down

Funding mix does the heaviest lifting. The Homecare Association's October 2026 fee rates report put the Minimum Price for Homecare in England at £34.42 an hour for 2026/27, while the councils and trusts in its research paid an average of £25.37, and not one contract it examined met the minimum. The Department of Health and Social Care's own return for 2025/26, which our Market Index uses, put the council average at £24.30 an hour, so the two figures describe different years. An agency delivering mostly council hours at those rates is working on margins a buyer can model to the penny, with little room to improve them after the sale. An agency with a meaningful share of private clients has better rates and more freedom over pricing, and a buyer can see a way to grow the business rather than simply take it over.

Retention is the second factor, and buyers read it as evidence that the hours will last. Skills for Care put staff turnover in domiciliary care at 23.5% in 2025/26, which gives every buyer a national benchmark to hold your agency against. If your turnover sits well below that, you are handing over a team that is likely to stay, and every hour on your rota becomes more believable. If it sits well above, the buyer assumes the cost of replacing carers, paying for agency cover and getting through a period of disruption straight after completion, and prices all of that in.

Close behind sits a question most owners have never been asked directly: how quickly can you staff a new package. An agency that can accept a referral on Tuesday and start on Thursday has real capacity and a working recruitment pipeline. An agency that needs three weeks is turning work away without recording it, and its growth is capped whatever the market does.

Your CQC position matters more in home care than many owners expect, because nearly two in five of the 13,437 home care agencies actively providing care in England have never been rated. An unrated agency can still be sold, but a buyer is pricing an unknown, and unknowns are priced cautiously.

04—The Owner

The Part That Sits With You Personally

The last factor is about the owner rather than the business. In many of the agencies we speak to, the coordination runs through one person, who holds the relationships with the commissioners, knows which carer will cover a Sunday at short notice, takes the out-of-hours calls and carries most of the operational detail in their head rather than in a system.

A buyer will see this within an hour of meeting you and will price it. If the thing that makes the rota work is you, then what they are buying is a client list and a staff list rather than a business that runs, and the risk of hours falling away after you leave is real. It is also one of the most fixable problems in a small business sale, which is why it belongs near the top of any plan to sell.

Fixing it takes longer than most owners expect. Moving out-of-hours cover onto a rota, putting a named person between you and the commissioners, writing down what only you currently know and giving your coordinators the authority to make decisions without checking with you will take a year or more to become believable. A buyer wants to see six months of the business running without you and the hours holding steady while it did.

05—The Figures

What to Measure Before Anyone Puts a Number on It

Four figures will be asked for by every buyer: weekly delivered hours split by who pays for them, carer retention over twelve months, the time from accepting a referral to starting the package, and the share of your income that comes from private clients. Agencies that start recording them tend to find the numbers improve, because measuring them makes them visible to the team.

It also helps when your accounts tell the same story. Many agencies put all their income through one line, which hides the private work a buyer would pay most for. Splitting income by funder costs nothing and makes the strongest part of your business easy to see.

For a first view of where your own agency sits, our valuation calculator takes a few minutes and asks the questions a buyer would. Plenty of good agencies go to market well below what eighteen months of preparation would have achieved, and most of what decides the final figure is within your control, though none of it happens quickly.

If you are starting to think about what your agency might be worth, whether that is next year or in five years, we are always happy to talk it through.

How we prepare and sell home care agencies is set out on our home care advisory page.

For current figures on how many home care agencies change owner each year, what they are asking and who owns them, see our Home Care Agency Market Index, updated every quarter.