Work out your care home charge

As part of our financial assessment process, and in line with legislation, most of your income will go towards paying for your care. Therefore, you may want to review your outgoings to ensure that you can pay your assessed contribution towards your care home fees.

You need to consider your current outgoings such as direct debits for rent, council tax and TV and phone packages. You may need to cancel, or give notice, on many of these as soon as your care home move has been confirmed.

You can keep a specified amount of money. This is called the personal expenses allowance. This allowance is to cover any day to day personal expenses, as your other costs like food, gas and electricity will be met by the care home.

Many people do not claim all the welfare benefits they are entitled to so, as part of your assessment, we will look at what other benefits you should have. If our calculation shows that there is an underlying entitlement, we will include this as part of the financial assessment and you should make the necessary benefit claim to the Department for Work and Pension.

We assess you on an individual basis.

What we include

We include

• state pension, pension guarantee credit, pension savings credit, and any other benefits you receive
• work, personal or widow's or widower's pension
• attendance and the care component of Disability Living Allowance for the first 4 weeks of your stay in the care home. These benefits stop after 4 weeks.
• any other income.

We do not include

• half of your occupational, personal pension or retirement annuity if your spouse or partner continues to live in your home, if you request this in writing
• your spouse or civil partner's pension
• the mobility component of the disability living allowance
• war disablement or supplementary pension
• £10 war pension, war widow's or civilian injury pension
• a personal allowance of £34.50 per week
• life insurance allowance of up to £5 per week
• a disregard of up to £8.15, if your weekly income is more than £260.15 per week or if you receive pension savings credit.

If you have savings over £21,500, we add tariff income to this amount.

Example - your weekly charge

Your weekly income is made up of a state pension of £168.17 and a guarantee credit of £49.98. You have savings and investments of £9,000.

Your weekly charge will be worked out as follows: