Long-Term Care Cost Calculator

Long-term care, whether that means a home health aide, an assisted living apartment, or a nursing home stay, ranks among the largest expenses a household may ever face, and this tool projects those costs forward with inflation so you can plan for them. For scale, the CareScout Cost of Care Survey for 2025 (released March 2026) put the national medians at $129,575 a year for a private nursing-home room ($355 a day), $114,975 for a semi-private room, $74,400 for assisted living ($6,200 a month) and $35 an hour for in-home non-medical care, which comes to $80,080 a year at 44 hours a week.

The calculator assumes care begins at age 80. It takes its built-in current annual cost for the care type you pick and grows it at the inflation rate you choose (none, 3% or 5%) for each year between your current age and 80: Cost at 80 = Current Cost × (1 + rate)^(80 − age). It then adds up 2, 3 or 5 years of care, raising the cost by the same rate in each later year, to produce the total.

These figures are national medians, so your real costs can swing widely with geographic location, the amenities of a given facility, and how much care you actually need. Plans tend to come up short when they assume too brief a stay or fail to account for care that grows more intensive over time. A financial advisor who specializes in long-term care planning can help pressure-test your assumptions.