Accountants for Domiciliary Care and Home Care Agencies
Written and reviewed by the Care Home Accountants editorial team. Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
A home care agency is not a small care home. There is no building full of beds; there is a rota of visits, a workforce that moves between clients all day, and local authority contracts that pay per hour rather than per resident. We act for domiciliary and home care providers across the UK, and we account for that model on its own terms.
This is the service to ask for when the pay run is the hard part: travel time between appointments, mileage, and a wage bill that has to clear the minimum wage once all the working time is counted. Preetesh Parmar FCCA at Tidy Money Ltd leads the work.
What We Cover for a Home Care Agency
We prepare your accounts and tax return, run the bookkeeping and management accounts, and operate the payroll that pays your carers. Because your cost base is almost entirely people and travel, we build the reporting around utilisation and the rate you are paid per hour against the rate you pay out, so you can see the margin on each contract rather than guessing at it.
Travel between one care appointment and the next counts as working time and has to be paid, and mileage has to be handled through an approved scheme. We set both up so the pay run is right the first time. Our guide to sleep-in shifts and the minimum wage explains the working-time rules the payroll has to satisfy.
Where Domiciliary Pay Gets Awkward
The trap is the minimum wage across a fragmented day. A carer paid per visit can drift below the National Living Wage once travel time between appointments is added to the hours worked, and HMRC treats that as an underpayment even when the per-visit rate looked generous. From 1 April 2025 the rate is £12.21 for those aged 21 and over, £10.00 for 18 to 20, and £7.55 for 16 and 17 year olds and apprentices. We check the average hourly rate against those figures before it becomes a liability.
Local authority contracts add their own friction: payment in arrears, agreed rates that lag your cost, and reconciliation between hours delivered and hours paid. Funding for your clients may come through the local authority means test, which our guide to care home fees and funding sets out, and we reconcile the contract income back to the visits actually delivered.
How We Run a Visiting-Care Practice
We work from cloud bookkeeping under Making Tax Digital and integrate the payroll so travel time and mileage flow through without rekeying. You send the rota and pay data, we run the checks, and the carers are paid correctly and on time.
Through the year you get management accounts that show the position by contract and by carer utilisation, so a loss-making contract is visible while you can still renegotiate it, not a year later in the accounts.
What Domiciliary Care Accounting Costs
We work to a fixed fee agreed before we start, driven by the size of the payroll and the number of local authority contracts rather than by the hour. The pay run is the heaviest part of the work, so we scope it honestly up front.
If you run both a home care arm and a care home, we quote them together and keep the two models separate in the books rather than blending them into one set of figures.