Your fees against local private fees
Are our private fees above or below what homes near us publish, and what does the council pay?
Upload your fee list. Ask Orrery sets your weekly fees by care type against the private fees homes publish in your council and region, and the council's rates.
When people use it: Before fee reviews and when enquiries are lost on price.
How it works, step by step
Upload your fees
Your current list price and what residents actually pay can differ; upload both if you have them.
Against the market
Many homes publish "from" prices, so published fees are a guide to the floor of the market.
What the council pays
Council rates and their history.
What you upload
- Your fee schedule or residents and fees list
Files are stored privately for your account, never shared with anyone and never used to train AI. You can delete them at any time. Spreadsheets, CSV, PDF and Word files all work, in your own layout.
Try it with sample files
Made up files for a made up provider, Example Care Group, so you can see what Ask Orrery does with them.
Questions you can ask
- “How do my Example House private weekly fees for residential, dementia and nursing compare with published private fees in Kent and the South East, and with Kent's council rates?”
- “Chart my fees against local private fees and the council rate by care type.”
Ask the data in plain English
A real question and answer from Ask Orrery, the assistant inside the platform, using the Example Care Group sample files above (October 2026). It works from your files and Orrery's data, and shows its sources.
Your private fees for residential and dementia sit below the Kent median, and your nursing fee is level with it. All three are well below the South East median.
Your average private weekly fee compared with published private fees (Orrery research, 15 Oct 2026)
| Care type | Example House | Kent median (lower to upper quartile) | South East median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | £1,391 (17 residents) | £1,500 (£1,409 to £1,600) | £1,600 |
| Residential dementia | £1,470 (4 residents) | £1,500 (£1,500 to £1,619) | £1,709 |
| Nursing | £1,600 (6 residents) | £1,605 (£1,550 to £1,865) | £1,933 |
- Residential: you are £109 below the Kent median and just under the lower quartile.
- Dementia: you are £30 below the Kent median, which is also the Kent lower quartile. You are £239 below the South East median.
- Nursing: you are £5 below the Kent median and inside the Kent range. You are £333 below the South East median.
Compared with Kent's council rates
Kent's council rates are £1,187 for residential and £1,378 for nursing (DHSC MSIF rates). Your private fees are:
- £204 (17%) above the council residential rate.
- £222 (16%) above the council nursing rate.
- £283 (24%) above the £1,187 you are paid for council-funded dementia residents. The tools don't give a separate Kent dementia rate, so I used your own figure.
How to read this
- Your figures come from your residents and fees spreadsheet for September 2026. They are averages of what residents actually pay.
- The published figures are what homes list on their websites. Many are "from" prices, so they understate what is really charged. In Kent that is 86% of residential, 94% of dementia and 100% of nursing prices.
- Kent has only 11 homes publishing nursing fees and 18 publishing dementia fees, so treat those medians with some caution.
- I haven't checked whether your nursing fees include the £260.15 weekly FNC. Check that before comparing.
The guide on setting next year's private fees may help: /app/guides/private-fees. I can also run a fee-rise model on your residents if you'd like.
Open in Orrery: /app/councils/kent
Ask, chart and report, in plain English
Ask Orrery answers from Orrery's data and your own files, draws charts on request and builds reports you can save as PDF. These are real examples made with the sample files.
- Published fees come from homes' own websites, collected each quarter; individual homes are never named.
Answer this with your own files
Subscribers get every guide, chart and projection for all 153 councils, Ask Orrery with private uploads of their own files, and every council report.
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