How Much Do Year-End Accounts Cost for a Care Home in the UK 2026/27?

The short answer: what year-end accounts cost a care home

Most UK care homes pay for year-end accounts as part of a monthly specialist plan rather than as a separate invoice. At LOYALS that runs from £349 a month for a single home of up to around 30 beds, and from £699 a month for a larger home or a multi-site group. Both figures already include the statutory accounts and the Corporation Tax return alongside the bookkeeping, payroll and VAT that feed them. Larger groups billing three or four funders typically sit at £1,200 to £1,500 a month.

Prefer to buy the year end on its own? A standalone set of care home accounts plus the CT600 starts from about £1,200 a year, which is the baseline for a growing limited company, and it climbs from there with bed count, funder mix and payroll headcount. The reason homes rarely do it that way is that the year end depends on twelve months of payroll, welfare VAT and accrued funder income being right, and nobody wants to reconstruct a year of sleep-in shifts in the fortnight before a filing deadline.

This is a regulated business, so the specialist framing matters more than in most sectors. A generalist can file a set of accounts. Whether those accounts stand up to a Care Quality Commission (CQC) financial viability review, or a bank asking questions before it refinances, is a different test. That is what our care home accountants price for, and it is why the number is not the same as a corner shop's.

What you are actually paying for

The fee covers two documents and all the work behind them. Year-end accounts are the statutory accounts that go to Companies House. The Corporation Tax return, the CT600, goes to HMRC with a tax computation attached. A care home limited company needs both every year, they share the same underlying figures, and a specialist prepares them together rather than as two disconnected jobs. For the return itself, LOYALS handles it as part of the annual accounts and Corporation Tax service.

Now the part a generalist tends to underprice. Before a care home's accounts can close, four things have to be right, and each one is specific to the sector:

• Sleep-in and night pay tested against the minimum wage. From 6 April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour and employer National Insurance sits at 15 percent above a £5,000 threshold. If sleep-in treatment or averaging across the pay reference period is wrong, the accounts carry a hidden back-pay liability that surfaces at the worst possible time.
• Accrued funder income recognised in the right period. Local authority, NHS Continuing Healthcare and private fees land on different cycles, and a chunk is usually unpaid at the year-end. Recognising that income correctly, and providing against what a funder is short-paying or clawing back, changes both the profit and the tax.
• The welfare VAT position applied to the numbers. Most care a regulated home provides is exempt from VAT, which sounds helpful until you refurbish. Exempt means you cannot reclaim the VAT on that refit, so it becomes part of the asset cost and flows through the accounts differently from a VAT-registered business.
• Occupancy and fee mix that a reader can trust. CQC financial viability sits inside the "well-led" question, and lenders ask the same thing. Statutory accounts describing a year that ended months ago do not answer it. Occupancy against capacity, average weekly fee achieved and the break-even point do.

None of that appears on a high-street firm's standard accounts checklist, because a shop does not have sleep-ins, a welfare exemption or a funder mix. It is the reason a care home's year end is a specialist job and not a commodity one.

The year-end and Corporation Tax deadlines a care home must not miss

A care home limited company faces three separate deadlines off the back of one year-end date, and they do not fall together. The statutory accounts are due at Companies House 9 months after your accounting year-end. The Corporation Tax bill has to be paid 9 months and 1 day after the year-end. The Company Tax Return, the CT600, is due at HMRC 12 months after the year-end.

Read that again, because the ordering is the trap. Payment falls due before the return does. A home that waits until the twelve-month filing deadline to do its numbers has already missed the payment date three months earlier and is quietly racking up HMRC interest. Getting the accounts done early is not tidiness, it is how you know what to pay and when.

What changes at Companies House from April 2028

The rules on filing accounts are tightening, and it lands squarely on the kind of small limited company most single-site care homes are. From April 2028, Companies House is removing its free web and paper filing route for accounts and moving everyone to commercial software with the figures tagged in the background. Small companies will also have to file a full profit and loss account, and the abridged accounts many owners currently rely on are being abolished, per the confirmed gov.uk guidance on accounts filing changes.

For a care home owner that means two practical things. First, your profit and loss becomes visible on the public register unless you take the available option to keep it off, so what your home earns and spends is no longer as private as it was. Second, DIY filing through the old free portal stops being possible, so the informal route some owners took quietly closes. Neither is a crisis, but both are a reason to have a specialist already handling the year end before the change arrives.

There is a parallel accounting change worth a line. The FRS 102 amendments that take effect for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026 bring in a new revenue recognition model and put most leases onto the balance sheet. For a care home that touches how funder income is recognised and how a leased premises or a leased vehicle shows up, which is one more reason the year end is not the same job it was two years ago.

Why a care home costs more than a generalist quotes

A generalist quotes for a care home the way they quote for any small company, then discovers the sector-specific work halfway through and either absorbs it badly or bills for it later. A specialist prices the real job upfront. The gap between the two is not the accounts themselves, it is everything the accounts depend on.

Here is how the three common approaches actually compare for a care home year end:

What this means for you: getting your year end right

If you own or run a care home, the practical steps are straightforward and mostly about timing.

1. Know your three dates. Write down your year-end, then add 9 months (accounts), 9 months and 1 day (pay the tax), and 12 months (file the CT600). Put the payment date in the diary, not just the filing date.
2. Get the payroll clean all year, not at year end. Sleep-in and minimum wage testing is far cheaper to keep right monthly than to reconstruct across a whole year of rotas.
3. Keep occupancy and fee mix visible. If a void opens or agency spend creeps, you want it in the numbers while the month can still be influenced, and ready when CQC or a lender asks.
4. Decide on a monthly plan versus a one-off. If the year end is the only thing you outsource, you are paying a specialist to fix twelve months of records in a fortnight. A monthly plan spreads the work and the cost and removes the deadline panic.
5. Get ahead of the April 2028 filing change. Software-only filing and a public profit and loss are coming, so have someone already set up to file that way rather than scrambling later.

None of this is exotic. It is sequencing and a bit of sector knowledge. Done through the year it lands cleanly and the accounts almost write themselves. Left to the last fortnight it becomes a scramble, and a care home is the last place you want a scramble over numbers.