A private caregiver is a home care worker a client or family hires directly, with no agency in between.
PHI, a direct care research and policy organization, calls this arrangement the “gray market”: home care workers hired by households with private funds, outside agencies and consumer-directed programs.
You agree on the schedule, duties and rate with the household itself, and the business side an agency normally handles — employment status, taxes, a written agreement — is there for the two of you to sort out.
What is a private (independent) caregiver?
The title describes the working arrangement, not a different kind of care work.
A private caregiver — also called a private duty caregiver, a private in-home caregiver or an independent caregiver — is hired and paid by a household instead of by a home care agency.
The tasks are the nonmedical work the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes for personal care aides, which it says are “sometimes called caregivers or personal attendants” and are generally limited to companionship, cleaning, cooking and driving.
Typical duties include helping with bathing and dressing, laundry and dishes, organizing schedules and appointments, arranging transportation, shopping and preparing meals, and keeping clients engaged socially.
Many aides work in clients' homes, and some work with one client long term.
Private work concentrates that pattern into a single direct relationship: one household is your client, and you may be its only caregiver.
Federal training floors do not follow you into this work.
PHI summarizes the split: home health aides and nursing assistants are federally required to complete at least 75 hours of training, including 16 hours of supervised practical training, and to pass a competency exam.
Training rules for personal care aides, by contrast, vary by state.
The one state rule this page checked is written for agencies.
Since January 2016, California has required Home Care Organizations to be licensed and has kept a public online registry of background-checked Home Care Aides, run by the California Department of Social Services' Home Care Services Branch.
Employers set their own asks on top of that, and BLS notes that aides may be required to obtain first aid and CPR certification.
Ask what a household expects before your first shift.
The work sits inside a fast-growing group.
BLS projects employment of home health and personal care aides to grow 18% from 2025 to 2035, with about 760,500 openings a year.
When you want to see how agencies and households phrase this work in real postings, browse private caregiver jobs.
How is private work different from agency work?
The employer changes, and everything downstream follows it.
With an agency, the agency is your employer: it recruits, schedules, supervises and pays you, and it owns the client relationship.
Federal rules bind agency work directly.
Certified home health and hospice agencies paid by federal programs such as Medicare must follow federal aide-employment regulations, while private agencies that do not receive federal funds may have other requirements that vary by state, as BLS notes.
Pay law draws the sharpest line between the two arrangements.
Since the DOL Home Care Rule, third-party employers such as home care agencies have not been able to claim the FLSA companionship or live-in exemptions.
Agency caregivers must therefore be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours, plus overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate past 40 hours in a workweek.
A household that employs you directly sits under different rules: it may, within limits, use the companionship and live-in exemptions the law denies to agencies.
The next section walks through where those limits sit.
Everything else is a trade you weigh for yourself.
Private work puts the rate, the schedule and the relationship in your hands — and it also hands you client-finding, schedule gaps when a client cancels, and the absence of an agency supervisor or backup caregiver.
Our research found no federal source that quantifies those trade-offs; they are the deal you negotiate household by household.
Direct hire also happens with public money.
PHI estimates there are at least 1.5 million Medicaid-funded “independent providers” — direct care workers employed directly by consumers through publicly funded consumer-direction programs.
Self-direction exists under several Medicaid authorities, which CMS names.
Those jobs look private from your side of the relationship — the household hires you — but enrollment and approved hours run through a publicly funded program — the money is public, not the family's.
Are you an employee or self-employed?
The IRS answers this with a control test, not a job title.
Its household-employer guide, Publication 926, says a worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done — and it makes no difference whether you were found through an agency or a list from one.
Publication 926 lists health aides and private nurses among household workers.
Run the test from your side.
If the household sets your schedule and directs how it wants tasks done, Publication 926 treats you as its household employee.
Where an agency provides the worker and controls the work, the IRS says the worker is not the family's employee.
Only a worker who controls how the work is done — the IRS pictures someone providing their own tools and offering services to the public — is self-employed.
Wage law covers this work too.
The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division lists companions, home health aides and personal care aides among the domestic service workers the FLSA covers when they work in or about a private home.
Two FLSA exemptions apply in household employment.
Both have edges:
- The companionship exemption: care counts as exempt companionship only when it is attendant to fellowship and protection. That means help with ADLs and IADLs must not exceed 20% of the total hours worked per person per workweek.
- Medically related tasks that typically require trained personnel are not companionship services at all — the DOL's examples include catheter care and turning and repositioning — and performing them costs the exemption for that workweek.
- The live-in exemption: a worker who resides on the employer's premises permanently or for extended periods, employed directly by an individual, family or household, is exempt from overtime but must still receive at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked. State law may add to this, so check your state's rules before you count on the exemption.
The classification decides who withholds and pays taxes, whether overtime is owed, and what paperwork exists at all.
It is fact-specific, so get it right before you invoice anyone.
Get the classification right before you sign
How do private caregivers find clients?
Start with the people who have seen you work: past clients and their families, coworkers who will pass your name along, and local networks such as senior centers and faith communities.
Our research found no federal source that catalogs where private clients come from, so treat this as practical craft rather than a rule.
Online marketplaces are the other front door, and the two this page checked are explicit about what they are not.
Care.com states it does not employ any caregiver.
It runs an initial criminal background check on individual caregivers hired through the site; families can see that the check was completed but cannot review the report.
Care.com itself cautions that the checks are not always 100% accurate and that their scope varies by state.
CareLinx, acquired by Sharecare in 2021, states it does not employ or recommend any care provider and describes its site as a venue that helps care seekers and providers connect.
It tells caregivers the service will “simplify your payroll and taxes” — tooling for the arrangement you and the client run, not an employment relationship.
Read that practically: a platform is a place to be found, not an employer.
Unless a program or payroll service says otherwise, the agreement, the pay, the taxes and the coverage stay between you and the household.
Publicly funded direct hire is the third route.
Medicaid self-direction gives the participant what CMS calls “employer authority” — the power to recruit, hire, train and supervise their own workers.
VA Veteran-Directed Care gives eligible veterans a budget to hire their own workers, which may include a family member or neighbor.
Those enrollments run through the programs, and the rules come from the state Medicaid agency or the VA.
What protection do you need (contract, insurance)?
Put the deal in writing before your first shift: the duties, the days and hours, the rate and pay date, how time gets recorded, what happens when a shift is canceled, and who buys supplies.
A written agreement is how both sides remember the deal — and for live-in arrangements, the FLSA treats it as more than a courtesy.
Employers of live-in domestic workers must keep a copy of the hours agreement and a record of the exact number of hours worked.
The DOL adds that a new agreement is needed when actual hours consistently differ from the one on file.
Sleep, meal and other periods of complete freedom from duty can be excluded from hours worked only by agreement, and any interruption by a call to duty counts as hours worked.
Paperwork follows the employment form.
When a household hires an employee to work regularly, the household and the employee each complete USCIS Form I-9, with the employee's section finished no later than the first day of work.
State obligations sit on the household's side of the desk, and they reach you.
IRS Publication 926 tells household employers to check with their state about state unemployment tax, other state employment taxes, and whether they must carry workers' compensation insurance for a household employee.
Ask directly how a household handles those before you start, and check your own state's rules.
Insurance is the open question this research cannot settle for you.
The sources this page draws on establish no general insurance requirement for independent caregivers, so what coverage makes sense for in-home work — and for the driving the job includes — is a question for a licensed insurance agent in your state.
Confirm with the agencies behind the rules
How much do private caregivers charge?
Our research found no federal source that publishes a private-pay rate, and this page will not invent one.
PHI, whose gray-market definition this page uses, says the direct-hire market's size is very difficult to measure — and its definition carries no rate data.
The closest federal numbers are wages, not rates: BLS has no separate “caregiver” occupation and reports home health and personal care aides combined (SOC 31-1120).
In May 2025 that combined group earned a median of $17.21 an hour, or $35,800 a year.
The full distribution runs wider: the 10th percentile wage was $13.00 an hour, the 75th percentile was $18.98 and the 90th percentile was $21.65.
In annual terms, the lowest-paid 10% of home health and personal care aides earned less than $27,040 and the highest-paid 10% earned more than $45,040 in May 2025.
Two labels belong on those numbers.
They are wages for payroll jobs — OEWS counts payroll employees and excludes the self-employed — so caregivers hired directly by households are missing from the count.
And they describe the combined aide group, not private caregivers: the closest available federal context, not a rate card.
The federal wage floor depends on the exemption.
The companionship exemption covers minimum wage as well as overtime, and a household may still claim it when all of its conditions are met.
Outside it, federal law sets a $7.25 minimum wage, and state or local minimums may be higher.
A live-in household employee must receive at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, even where overtime is exempt.
What you charge is yours to set.
Hands-on personal care is different work from companionship visits, overnight and live-in schedules differ from hourly shifts, and your training, references and local wage levels all belong in the number.
If you are self-employed, remember that the rate is revenue: taxes and costs come out of it, which is a conversation for a CPA.
For the full federal tables, including state-by-state figures, see the site's caregiver pay page.
Career information, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Confirm wage, tax and coverage questions with the DOL, the IRS and your state, or with a CPA or a licensed insurance agent.