The average man who uses long-term care will pay $250,000 for that care over a lifetime, while the average woman who uses long-term care will pay $350,000, according to the J.P Morgan Guide to Retirement.
That care tends to be cheaper in some states than others, according to the CareScout Cost of Care survey, released in early March.
CareScout, a unit of Genworth Financial that offers long-term care insurance, contacted 211,985 care providers by phone and email to complete about 16,000 surveys on the costs of their services. They calculated median costs by state and city across several care types:
— Non-medical in-home care. Costs increased 3% year-over-year to $35 per hour or $80,080 a year nationwide, assuming 44 hours of care a week.
— In-home care by a registered nurse or licensed practical nurse. Private-duty nursing care, a new category in the survey, costs a median $90 per hour or $160 per visit nationwide.
— Adult day health care services. Costs fell 5% to $95 per day, or $24,700 annually, based on five days of usage per week.
— Assisted living. Median costs rose 5% to $6,200 a month or $74,400 a year. "Growth slowed compared to the double-digit increase reported in 2024 and continues to track closely with broader rental housing trends," CareScout said in a statement.
— Nursing home care. Median costs rose 2% to $114,975 a year, or $315 a day, for a semi-private room in a nursing home, and 1% to $129,575 a year, or $355 a day, for a private room. "The modest increases reflect ongoing inflationary and workforce pressures in higher-acuity care settings," CareScout said.
CareScout provides a lookup tool for long-term care costs by location. ThinkAdvisor analyzed CareScout's median annual cost data to find the states where care is cheapest, and most expensive, overall.
We ranked states using a composite score derived from the median annual costs of each care type. For each care type, states were assigned a percentile rank from 0 to 1 based on relative cost.
Each state's ranking reflects the average of its percentile ranks across the available care types.
Care types for which CareScout did not report data for a state were excluded from that state's average. (Adult day health care, for example, is uncommon in several states.)
See the accompanying slideshow for the 10 cheapest states for long-term care.
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