The short answer: what a domiciliary care accountant costs
A specialist accountant for a domiciliary care provider costs from £299 to £999 a month in 2025/26, and the number that lands on your quote is decided almost entirely by how many carers you pay. Domiciliary care, sometimes called home care, means delivering personal care to people in their own homes, and in England that work usually sits under registration with the Care Quality Commission, the regulator known as the CQC.
Why headcount and not turnover? Because the heaviest, most error-prone part of the work is payroll, and payroll scales with carers, not revenue. A generic bookkeeping client with twelve invoices a month is light work. A 46-carer home care agency with split shifts, multiple visit rates, travel time and mileage running through every pay cycle is a different animal, and the fee reflects that. This is the kind of operational complexity we focus on as specialist healthcare and social care accountants.
The other thing the fee buys is sector knowledge you do not see on the invoice line. Whether personal care is exempt from VAT, how to average National Minimum Wage across travel time so a Fair Work or HMRC check passes, how to recognise a council or NHS contract that pays in arrears: these are the points where a non-specialist quietly leaks your money. We come back to each one below.
What you actually pay, by number of carers
Your monthly fee tracks the size of your care team far more closely than it tracks your income. Three broad bands cover most UK home care providers, and the figures below are LOYALS anchor prices for a full monthly service, not a stripped year-end-only deal.
- Up to 30 carers: from £299 a month. Full bookkeeping, payroll for the whole team, monthly management accounts, VAT where it applies and year-end accounts.
- 30 to 100 carers: from £549 a month. Everything above at a heavier payroll volume, plus contract income reconciliation against rota delivery and tighter monthly margin reporting.
- 100 plus carers: from £999 a month. Multi-rate payroll at scale, NHS and local authority contract revenue recognition, and management accounts built for a board or funder.
New providers have a separate, one-off need before any of this: a credible cashflow forecast to support CQC registration. A registration pack with thin or unrealistic numbers gets bounced, and that delay costs you a launch window. Our CQC cashflow forecast, covering a three-year profit and loss, balance sheet and funding narrative, starts from £999 as a one-off.
What a domiciliary care accountant does each month
A domiciliary care accountant runs payroll for the full care team, reconciles local authority and NHS contract income against the bank, prepares management accounts so you can see margin against occupancy, checks National Minimum Wage compliance across travel time, and files PAYE and any VAT on time. That is the monthly rhythm, and most of the value sits in the parts a generalist treats as optional.
Payroll is the heaviest piece. National Minimum Wage, currently £12.21 an hour from April 2025, has to be met on average across all paid working time, and for home care that includes the time carers spend travelling between visits. HMRC is explicit that travel between appointments counts as working time, so a carer paid per visit can quietly fall below the legal minimum once their travel is included. Proving compliance means averaging earnings across contact hours and travel for every carer, every pay run. Get it wrong and you face an arrears bill plus a penalty, and your name can appear on a public naming list.
Contract income is the second piece. Councils and NHS bodies pay in arrears and not always at the rate or volume you invoiced. Recognising that revenue correctly, and reconciling it against the care actually delivered on the rota, is what turns a pile of remittances into a management account you can trust. For the payroll engine behind all of this, see our payroll and PAYE service.
The third piece is keeping the figures CQC-ready all year, not scrambling for them at inspection or registration renewal. A provider who can show clean, current financials demonstrates the financial viability the regulator looks for, and that is far easier when the numbers are maintained monthly rather than rebuilt under pressure.
Why a generalist often costs you more than they save
A high street accountant who charges less per month usually costs a care provider more once the avoided cost is counted, because the work that protects your margin is precisely the work they do not do. Three gaps come up again and again.
The travel-time minimum wage gap
Most generalists run a care payroll the way they run a shop payroll: hours in, pay out. They do not average National Minimum Wage across travel time, because most clients do not have travel time. For home care that omission is a live liability. We have seen providers carry months of unnoticed underpayment because nobody told them travel between visits had to be paid and counted. You can read HMRC's position in its guidance on calculating the minimum wage.
The VAT exemption trap
Personal care delivered by a CQC-registered provider is generally exempt from VAT as a welfare service, not zero-rated. The difference matters: exempt means you do not charge VAT and you cannot reclaim most input VAT either. A generalist who treats your care income as taxable, or who misreads a staff-supply arrangement to another provider, can register you wrongly or miss a genuine liability. The line is set out in HMRC's welfare services VAT notice, and it is a specialist judgement, not a checkbox.
The invisible-margin gap
With the Homecare Association minimum price for homecare in England set at £32.14 an hour for 2025/26 and the reported average council fee rate nearer £24.10, your margin is wafer thin before a single avoidable cost. A generalist who only sees your numbers once a year cannot tell you in March that a particular contract is being delivered below cost. A specialist watching it monthly can.
The three things that move your fee up or down
Within those bands, three factors decide where your specific quote lands, and knowing them lets you control the cost rather than be surprised by it.
One: payroll headcount and pay frequency. Forty carers paid weekly is more monthly work than forty carers paid monthly, because a weekly cycle means four runs not one, each with its own travel-time averaging and rota reconciliation. If you can move to a fortnightly or monthly cycle without upsetting your team, the fee usually eases.
Two: contract complexity. A single private-pay model is simpler than a mix of local authority framework rates, direct-payment clients and NHS-funded packages, each invoiced and paid differently. The more revenue streams, the more reconciliation, and the more the figures need watching against actual delivery.
Three: how clean your records arrive. A provider using a care rostering system that exports clean hours and visits costs less to run than one sending spreadsheets and paper timesheets. Tidy source data is the single biggest lever you control. If you already run good rostering software, say so on the scoping call, because it genuinely lowers the quote.
Here is how the three common approaches actually compare for a domiciliary care provider:
| What you need | DIY / software | Generic accountant | LOYALS specialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Averages National Minimum Wage across travel time | ✗ You self-check | ✗ Rarely | ✓ Every pay run |
| Applies the welfare VAT exemption correctly | ✗ | ● If asked | ✓ Built in |
| Reconciles council and NHS contract income to rota | ✗ | ● Year end only | ✓ Monthly |
| Keeps figures CQC-registration ready | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Maintained monthly |
| Builds a CQC cashflow forecast for registration | ✗ | ● Generic template | ✓ Sector-specific |
| Open Mon to Sat for urgent payroll questions | ✗ | ✗ Mon to Fri 9 to 5 | ✓ 10am to 7pm Mon to Sat |
This is why home care providers who scale past their first dozen carers tend to move from a generalist to a specialist.
When the fee pays for itself
For most domiciliary care providers the specialist fee pays for itself inside the first quarter, and often on a single issue. The maths is simple once you put the avoided costs next to the fee.
Take a mid-sized agency on the £549 a month band, around £6,588 a year. One National Minimum Wage averaging error caught before HMRC finds it can dwarf that figure once you account for arrears across a whole team plus penalties. One contract spotted as loss-making and renegotiated, on the £8.04-an-hour gap shown above, recovers the fee many times over across a year of delivered hours. One VAT position confirmed correctly, rather than guessed, removes a risk that can run to five figures.
None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary result of someone who knows the sector watching the right numbers every month instead of once a year. If your wider interest runs to residential settings as well, the running-cost question there is slightly different, and we break it down in how much an accountant costs for a care home.
What this means for you: what to do before you choose
Choosing an accountant for a home care agency is mostly about checking they understand the work before they quote. A few practical steps save you from the cheap-then-expensive trap.
- Ask how they handle travel-time minimum wage. If the answer is vague, walk. This is the single most common compliance failure in the sector.
- Ask about the VAT position on personal care. A specialist will mention the welfare exemption without prompting. A generalist will often promise to "look into it".
- Get the quote tied to carer numbers, not turnover. A fee scoped to headcount means it has been thought through for care, not lifted from a generic price list.
- Confirm what is included. Payroll, bookkeeping, VAT, management accounts and year end should be in one monthly figure, with quotes issued in writing.
- If you are pre-registration, ask for a CQC cashflow forecast. A credible three-year projection is what gets a registration pack over the line.
Do this and the decision gets clear fast. The right firm will be comfortable talking about rotas, travel time and contract rates on the first call, because that is the language of your business, not an afterthought.