Your true cost per care hour against the council rate
What does a delivered hour of care really cost us, including travel, mileage and overheads, and does the council rate cover it?
Upload carer payroll and a visit log. Ask Orrery works out pay per contact hour including travel and mileage, adds employer costs and overheads, and sets the result against the council's hourly rate and a minimum price.
When people use it: Before council rate consultations, tenders and private price reviews.
How it works, step by step
Upload payroll and visits
A visit log export from your rostering system is ideal.
The build up
Pay for contact time is only part of the cost; travel, holiday and employer costs add a lot.
The council's rate
Hourly rates across councils you could serve.
What you upload
- Carer payroll
- A visit log (planned and actual times, travel)
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
- “Using my Example Home Care payroll and visit log, what is my cost per contact hour including travel time, mileage, employer National Insurance, pension and holiday? How does it compare with Kent's council home care rate?”
- “Chart the build up of my cost per hour against the council rate.”
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 direct cost per contact hour is £17.76 as you pay it today, before pension and holiday. If you paid travel time, it would be about £20.21. Kent's council rate is £28.05 an hour (DHSC, 2026 Q3), so the gap before pension, holiday and overheads is £10.29 as paid today, or about £7.84 with travel time paid.
From your September payroll (28 carers, 3,360.21 contact hours):
| Item | Cost | Per contact hour |
|---|---|---|
| Pay for contact hours | £49,998.77 | £14.88 |
| Mileage at 30p (13,121 miles) | £3,936.37 | £1.17 |
| Employer NI, 15% above £5,000 a year per carer | about £5,750 | £1.71 |
| Total as paid today | about £59,685 | £17.76 |
| Travel time if paid (481.26 hours, at your average rate) | about £7,161, plus about £1,074 NI | about £2.45 |
| Total with travel paid | about £67,920 | £20.21 |
- Travel time: it is recorded but not paid, so it adds nothing to your cost today.
- Check on travel: your visit log (1 to 14 September) agrees with the payroll. Travel is 14.3% of contact time in both. Unpaid travel can raise minimum wage questions, so take professional advice and see the minimum-wage-check guide.
- Employer NI: this is my calculation using the 15% rate and £5,000 threshold from the Orrery policy timeline. It ignores the Employment Allowance, which could reduce it.
- Pension and holiday: your payroll file has no pension or holiday figures, and I have no rates to use, so I have left them out. Each 1% of pay adds about £0.15 an hour on today's pay, or £0.17 with travel paid. Tell me your pension percentage and holiday accrual and I will add them.
Against Kent: the trade body's minimum price for 2026/27 is £34.42 an hour (Kent Care Market Report). Kent's 2026/27 rate is not yet published. About 66.5% of your delivered minutes are council funded (visit log), so the Kent rate matters a lot to your margin.
Open in Orrery: /app/guides/home-care-cost-per-hour?council=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.
- A council rate below your full cost per hour means each council hour needs private work to cover it.
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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