How to Hire Companion Caregivers: An Employer's Guide

A companion caregiver staffs the non-medical end of your service line. The assignment is companionship and conversation, safety oversight, meal preparation, light housekeeping, shopping, errands and transportation — with no hands-on personal care. When a client's needs move to help with bathing, dressing or toileting, that assignment becomes personal care work for a differently trained hire, and your companion role description should say so before a client or a candidate has to find out mid-visit.

Federal wage-hour law defines companionship services too, for a different purpose. The Department of Labor defines companionship services as fellowship and protection. Under that definition, care — help with activities of daily living or instrumental activities — counts only while it does not exceed 20 percent of the total hours worked per person and per workweek (29 CFR 552.6). Medically related tasks are never companionship services in that definition: catheter care, turning and repositioning, ostomy care, tube feeding and treating bedsores are outside it. The definition sets the scope of a minimum wage and overtime exemption that only the household itself may claim (29 CFR 552.109), so it does not change what your agency owes, covered under pay below. Keep medically related tasks out of a companion role description entirely, and route the clients who need them to staff trained for that scope.

Some state rules describe the companion boundary in their own words. Oklahoma, for example, licenses agencies that provide only companion or sitter services and describes those services as household tasks, shopping, meal preparation, fellowship, transportation and other non-personal care (63 O.S. § 1-1972). Definitions like that one are useful when you write a posting: they give you a regulator's own task list for the words "companion" and "sitter."

For your organization, the companion hire is a coverage and matching job. Your agency adds the structure a solo arrangement has to improvise — recruiting for the role, matching the right person to each client's schedule and personality, supervising visits, and keeping every shift on the calendar filled. Because the assignment includes no hands-on care, your screening and training can concentrate on reliability, boundaries and the judgment a home visit run alone requires.

The worker's side of this role — what draws people to companion work and how it compares with personal care jobs — lives in the companion caregiver career guide. This page stays on the employer's side of the hire.

Start from the assignment rather than the title. A companionship assignment with no hands-on care calls for a different qualification list than a personal care assignment, and the rules that apply follow what your agency provides and where it operates.

The federal training floors you may have read about attach to certified settings, not to companion staff. Medicare-certified home health agencies must give their home health aides at least 75 hours of training, with at least 16 hours of supervised practical training (42 CFR 484.80). Companion work sits outside that certified setting, so the training rules for your companion hires come from your state's rules for non-medical caregivers, where your state has them, plus the requirements you set as an employer.

Oregon's rule for in-home care agency caregivers (OAR 333-536-0070) shows what a state's list looks like for non-medical staff. Its in-home care agency caregivers must:

• Be at least 18 and complete an agency-specific orientation of at least 4 hours before independently providing services.
• Finish at least 8 hours of initial training — 2 hours before providing services and 6 more within 120 days of hire, with up to 1 hour of competency evaluation counting toward the 8.
• Have competency evaluated through direct observation plus written or oral testing before working independently.
• Complete at least 4 hours of basic non-injectable medication training before being assigned any medication services.

Oregon is one state's rule, not a template for companion staffing everywhere. Build your qualification list from what your own state agency requires of the agencies it regulates. Then add the items you decide as an employer: a driver's license and insurance standard for staff who transport clients, the communication a solo visit runs on, and the boundary rules a companionship assignment depends on.

Rules change, and they are state-specific. Confirm the qualification and training requirements that apply to your companion caregivers with the state agency that oversees home care in your state before you write them into a posting or an offer.

If you are still building the hiring sequence itself, the employer hiring guide walks the whole process for senior care employers, from the first posting to the retention file.

Start the search with the channels you already run, because the ones you control are the ones that compound: employee referrals with a structured reward, previous applicants and rehires already in your file, and your own postings. Community organizations, senior centers, faith communities and local training programs extend the list when you need reach beyond your own pipeline.

Write the ad around what the job actually includes, because companionship applicants are choosing a different job than personal care applicants. Name the visit types and settings, the driving expectations, and the training you provide, and keep protected characteristics out of the wording. EEOC-enforced laws make it illegal to publish a job ad that shows a preference for or discourages applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 and over), disability or genetic information. The EEOC's own example is an ad seeking "females" or "recent college graduates", which may discourage men and people over 40 from applying and may violate the law.

The channel detail — which boards deserve budget, how referral rewards are structured, how to sequence a posting — belongs to the recruitment strategy guide. Before you publish, browse the companion caregiver jobs board to see the postings your ad will compete against and what candidates in your market are being offered.

Screen every candidate through the same sequence, in the same order: application review, phone screen, interview, reference calls, then the background screening your state and your payer contracts require. A fixed sequence treats candidates alike and leaves you a record of how every hire was made.

When you order a consumer report — a criminal background check, or a motor vehicle record for staff who drive — the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires a clear written disclosure in a stand-alone document and the applicant's written authorization first (15 U.S.C. 1681b(b)(2)).

State rules add the checks you cannot skip. Oregon requires in-home care agencies to run a criminal records check and make a fitness determination before hiring anyone who will have direct contact with clients (OAR 333-536-0093). Nebraska regulates companion and homemaker services a different way: its statutes for in-home personal services agencies (Neb. Rev. Stat. 71-6501 to 71-6504) set worker qualification and background-check duties without a state license requirement — a reminder that a state with no agency license can still regulate exactly who you send into a client's home.

Exclusions matter once public program money is in the mix. No Medicare, Medicaid or other federal health care program payment may be made for items or services furnished by an excluded individual or entity (42 CFR 1001.1901). A provider that keeps a person it knows or should know is excluded on staff risks civil money penalties, an assessment and its own exclusion. Federal law does not require providers to check the HHS-OIG exclusion list, but OIG recommends screening before hire and monthly, because the list updates monthly.

Call references yourself rather than delegating all of them. A short conversation with a former supervisor tells you more about call-offs, punctuality and boundaries than a written file: ask whether the person showed up on schedule, how they handled a client request that went past the assignment, and whether they would rehire them.

The step-by-step — consent forms, county and national records, registries and exclusion lists, and how to handle findings — is the background checks guide's territory. Confirm your screening sequence with the state agencies that regulate your setting, or with health-care counsel, before you hire.

BLS publishes no separate wage line for companions. The closest published group is home health and personal care aides (SOC 31-1120), which BLS reports as one combined occupation — benchmark against it and label it as the broader group, never as a companion wage, when you take the numbers into a budget conversation.

In the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, that group earned a national median of $17.21 an hour — $35,800 a year — with a 10th-to-90th percentile hourly range of $13.00 to $21.65. The industry row matters for a companion agency's budget: in services for the elderly and persons with disabilities (NAICS 624120), where most non-medical home care agencies are classified, the median was $16.73 an hour. That classification is a general convention — individual agencies may be coded under home health care services — so treat the row as context, not a rule.

Treat both figures as benchmarks, not offers. What you need to pay is set by the postings companion candidates in your market are actually comparing against yours, so read live listings next to the BLS numbers and adjust for driving time, visit length and how much homemaker work each assignment includes.

Budget the wage-hour rules into the offer before you post it. Since January 1, 2015, third-party employers such as home care agencies cannot claim the FLSA companionship-services exemption. Your agency therefore owes companion caregivers at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, plus overtime at time-and-a-half over 40 hours in a workweek. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, unless your state or local government sets more. The ban holds even when the household jointly employs the worker: only the household itself may still claim the exemption (29 CFR 552.109). Travel between clients during the workday is hours worked and your agency pays it; ordinary home-to-work commuting is not.

If you promise a sign-on or attendance bonus, build it into the overtime math: bonuses promised at hiring or to keep workers on the job belong in the regular rate used to compute overtime (29 CFR 778.211).

Interview against the assignment, not a generic script. The scenarios worth asking are about scope and judgment: a client asks for help getting into the shower — what does the companion do? A client offers cash, or asks to borrow money? You arrive and the client is not home, or a family member asks for a task that is not on the plan? Listen for answers that stay inside the role, protect boundaries, and move the question up to the office rather than improvising in the living room.

Keep your questions about the job and the candidate's work history. The EEOC advises that pre-employment questions that would indicate an applicant's race, sex, national origin, disability status, age, religion, color or ancestry should generally be avoided.

Timing is set by the ADA if you require a health screening: a covered employer may require a medical exam only after a job offer and before duties begin, and only if every entering employee in the job category gets one (42 U.S.C. 12112(d)(3)).

The same rules reach matching. EEOC-enforced laws bar making job assignment decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 and over), disability or genetic information — the rule a client's request for a caregiver of a particular race or sex puts in play. A client's request for a companion of a particular sex is not a scheduling preference you can simply grant; set your assignment policy with counsel and apply it the same way to every client.

Then put the offer in writing with the concrete terms of the job. Name the visit types and shifts covered, the hourly rate, how travel between clients is paid, mileage and transportation expectations, the training you provide and when it happens, and the client types the role covers. Complete Form I-9 Section 2 within three business days of the hire (8 CFR 274a.2) so the file starts clean.

Onboarding starts before the first solo visit. Sequence it around your state's requirements first — in Oregon, the agency orientation comes before any independent work. Then layer your own program on top: documentation, the clock-in routine your scheduling system uses, gift and boundary policies, and the office's escalation path for changes a companion notices during a visit. Finish with introductions to the clients on the routes they will cover.

Pair every new companion with an experienced one for shadow visits on the routes they will actually work, name the supervisor they report to, and put a check-in on the calendar before small problems have time to become resignations.

Retention is where the hiring math pays out. BLS Employment Projections put home health and personal care aide employment at 4,677,100 jobs in 2025, growing 18.1% to a projected 5,524,400 by 2035, with 760,500 openings a year projected — competition for the aides you have already trained. The levers are the ones your own records point at. They include schedules that match what the offer promised, pay practices that follow the wage-hour rules above, mileage and travel-time terms that hold up on a long driving day, and recognition that reaches the person working alone in a client's kitchen.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, medical, benefits or tax advice. Qualification, screening, wage and classification rules come from the state agencies and federal bodies named above — confirm the current requirements with the state agency that oversees home care in your state, the DOL, or your own attorney or CPA before you hire.