Top 10 Cheapest States for Long-Term Care Costs: 2013

Will you or your client be one of the 70% of people over 65 who will need long-term care at some time in your life? Genworth’s annual study on the cost of LTC, whether from a nursing home, adult day care center, licensed home care provider or assisted living facility, indicates that if you are, you will—unsurprisingly—be paying more for it, as prices continue to escalate steadily.

The study, running for its 10th year, indicates that over the past five years the median annual rate for a room in a private nursing home has increased by 4.45% (compound annual growth rate), so that the room you might have had in 2008 at a cost of $67,525 will now cost you $83,950—an additional $16,425 per year.

If that news isn’t cheery enough, the cost of care just for Alzheimer’s disease, which affects 5.1 million Americans, is projected to rise to $1.2 trillion annually by 2050. That figure is just for paid care—health care, long-term care and hospice—and does not include the cost of unpaid care from such caregivers as family members. According to the study, unpaid caregivers’ contribution was some 17.5 billion hours of care, valued at more than $216.5 billion—just in 2012.

With Genworth’s mobile app and interactive map, advisors and clients can keep abreast of what care is likely to cost, and where they might get the most for their care dollars—there is, after all, considerable variation among states in cost. The 2013 Cost of Care Survey, conducted by CareScout, includes nearly 15,000 LTC providers from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., divided into 437 regions across the country.

The following are the top 10 cheapest states for LTC costs after costs have been averaged for the categories of adult day care, licensed home care, assisted living and nursing home private rooms. (You may notice a substantial difference in averages from last year’s figures, since last year we excluded adult day care from the averages because the figures varied widely enough from state to state to skew the results. This year other categories exhibited widely varying figures as well, so adult day care has been included in our calculations.)

10. Kansas