Self-Employed Carer vs Agency: Which Pays More?
Almost every experienced carer asks this question sooner or later. If a family is paying an agency £35 an hour, and you are being paid £12.71, where is the other £23 going? And what would actually change if you went self-employed?
The short answer is that self-employed carers earn significantly more per hour than agency carers. The longer answer is that money is not the only thing that changes when you leave an agency, and it is worth being clear about the whole picture before taking the plunge into self-employment.
This guide sets out what each model actually pays, what agency overheads are for, what the real trade-offs are, and how to decide whether self-employment is right for you. If you want a step-by-step on the practical side of the move, our guide on how to become a self-employed carer in the UK walks through it.
Agency pay in 2026
Most agency-employed carers in the UK are paid between £12 and £15 per hour, with entry-level roles often sitting right at the legal minimum. A few specialist or London agencies pay more, particularly for live-in or nursing-led roles. The National Living Wage in 2026 is £12.71 per hour, so entry-level agency pay often sits at the legal minimum.
Agency pay can include:
Paid holiday (28 days, including bank holidays for full-time staff)
Sick pay (statutory, and sometimes a small company top-up)
Pension contributions (a minimum of 3% of qualifying earnings)
Training (mandatory training is usually paid for by the agency)
Uniform and some expenses
Agency pay does not usually include:
Full travel time (often capped or unpaid between visits)
Mileage at HMRC rates
Time spent on admin or paperwork
Premiums for unsociable hours, unless specifically agreed
In practice, a full-time agency carer earning £13 per hour takes home around £20,000 to £22,000 a year after tax, depending on hours. Not much for the work involved.
What agencies charge clients
Families hiring a traditional home care agency typically pay £30 to £40 per hour for visiting care, and £1,200 to £2,000 per week for live-in care.
The gap between what the family pays and what the carer earns covers:
Carer pay
Employer National Insurance and pension contributions
Holiday and sick pay
Supervision, rostering, and management
Training and compliance
Rent
Insurance
Recruitment
CQC registration and regulatory costs (for CQC-registered providers)
Office overheads
Anything left goes to profit margin
Some of those costs are real and valuable. Others are simply overhead that has piled up over time. The question for a carer thinking about self-employment is: how much more can I pocket if I go self-employed for some or all of my work?
Self-employed carer pay
Self-employed carers in the UK in 2026 typically charge between £20 and £25 an hour. Live-in work usually sits at £150 to £180 per day. There are exceptions, but broadly this covers daytime work on weekdays.
At £20 per hour for 30 client hours a week over 46 working weeks, a self-employed carer grosses around £27,600 per year. After tax, National Insurance, insurance premiums, training, and basic costs, take-home pay sits around £22,000 to £24,000. At £25 per hour over the same hours, gross is closer to £34,500 and take-home moves up to around £27,000 to £30,000, which is materially more than the £20,000 to £22,000 that the equivalent agency carer earns.
The difference is even clearer for live-in work. A self-employed live-in carer earning £170 per day works out at around £1,190 per week, or upwards of £50,000 per year gross if working most of the year. Agency live-in pay is typically £700 to £900 per week before tax, or roughly £32,000 for 40 weeks of work.
What you lose when you go self-employed
Be honest with yourself about the losses, because they are real.
Paid holiday. You do not get any. If you take two weeks off, you earn nothing for two weeks. You need to build holiday into your rate.
Sick pay. No Statutory Sick Pay. If you are ill, the work stops.
Employer pension contributions. If you want a pension, you have to pay into it yourself.
Guaranteed hours. An agency usually gives you a rota. Self-employment means finding your own work.
Admin support. Rostering, invoicing, record-keeping, and tax are all yours to handle.
Back-up cover. If you cannot work, nobody is automatically stepping in. You need to have your own arrangements for clients.
These are real costs, not hypothetical ones. The upside of self-employment usually outweighs them for experienced carers, but anyone considering the move should go in with their eyes open.
What you gain from going self-employed
Alongside the losses, here is what you actually gain:
Significantly higher pay per hour (commonly 50 to 65% more)
Control over your schedule and which clients you take on, including real flexibility around your own family schedule
Direct relationships with families, without an agency meddling
Autonomy over how the work is done
The ability to scale your earnings by taking on more hours, or specialising
A sense of professional ownership that agency work often lacks
For many carers, the autonomy and the quality of the relationships matter as much as the money. The two things reinforce each other: when you choose your clients and set your own rates, the work tends to be better.
The middle ground: self-employed through a platform like Gladys
The traditional choice was binary. You either worked for an agency and accepted the pay, or you went fully independent and handled everything yourself.
Platforms like Gladys offer a middle ground. You are fully self-employed, you set your own rates, and you work directly with families. But the matching, introductions, and admin for finding work are handled for you. You do not have to build your own marketing, chase leads, or spend evenings on Facebook groups trying to find work. We also step in if a client ever fails to pay, which means a carer is never left out of pocket.
That middle ground is what we have found most carers actually want: the better pay and autonomy of self-employment, without the hardest part of running your own business, and back-up when it counts.
Self-employment clearly pays better, but there is always a trade
For an experienced carer, self-employment almost always pays more per hour, and usually pays more in absolute terms as well. The 65% pay uplift that carers often see on platforms like Gladys is not marketing language. It reflects the simple economics of cutting out layers of overhead.
The caveat is that self-employment requires more from you in terms of professionalism, admin, and self-management. If you are prepared for that, the rewards are real. Many carers on Gladys earn well above the typical agency salary within their first year, and live-in carers materially more again. For a fuller picture of what to expect day-to-day, the ultimate guide to going self-employed as a carer covers the practical setup in more detail.
Working with Gladys
At Gladys, carers earn around 65% more per hour than they would at an agency. You stay fully self-employed, you set your own rates, and you work directly with the families you are matched with.
We handle the matching and introductions. We screen and support clients to make sure the work is suitable. And we leave the care itself where it belongs: in the hands of experienced professionals working on their own terms.
Find out more about working with Gladys → or see how it all fits together →.
Final thoughts
The question is not really "which pays more". It is "which way of working makes your career sustainable".
Agency work offers predictability and benefits. Self-employment offers better pay, autonomy, and ownership. For experienced carers who are confident in their practice and tired of giving two-thirds of their hourly value to an intermediary, self-employment is usually the better model, particularly when a platform takes the hardest parts out.
If you are thinking about the move, do the maths honestly. Factor in holiday, sickness, tax, insurance, and a pension. If the numbers still work, and the autonomy appeals, there has rarely been a better time to make the change.
