Home Health and Personal Care Aides
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for home health and personal care aides is Washington, at $47,730. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and North Dakota comes out ahead, worth $38,240. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for home health and personal care aides: Washington leads at $47,730 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting North Dakota to $38,240 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$35,800
People doing it
4,305,810
Highest paid
$47,730
WA
Best off, really
$38,240
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$27,040
Highest tenth
$45,040
Lowest, really
$22,190
TX
States with data
51
National average
$36,120
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $22,190 up to $38,240.
- About 4,305,810 people in the country do this job. Very few jobs are this big. That is part of why its geography is worth setting out with care.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $35,800. Nothing is missing.
- The nominal spread for home health and personal care aides approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $22,190 to $38,240, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 4,305,810 workers are employed nationally in home health and personal care aides. At this scale the occupation's wage geography is a macroeconomic fact as much as a career one, and small per-worker differentials aggregate into substantial regional flows.
- Coverage for home health and personal care aides is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Home Health and Personal Care Aides
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $27,040 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $35,800 |
| Top tenth earn over | $45,040 |
| This salary | $35,800 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Home Health and Personal Care Aides
The national median for this job
$35,800around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $27,040 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $35,800 |
| Top tenth | $45,040 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Home Health and Personal Care Aides, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $22,520 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $47,730 |
| Spread | $25,210 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $24,230 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $24,934 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $39,440 | $33,870 | $38,240 |
| WA | $47,730 | $40,531 | $37,334 |
| SD | $37,740 | $32,504 | $36,897 |
| VT | $41,600 | $34,468 | $35,669 |
| RI | $43,680 | $36,059 | $35,557 |
| IA | $36,080 | $30,411 | $34,259 |
| MT | $36,630 | $30,647 | $33,960 |
| AK | $39,740 | $34,111 | $33,536 |
| NE | $36,150 | $30,285 | $33,510 |
| KY | $36,440 | $30,302 | $33,494 |
| OR | $44,410 | $34,528 | $32,971 |
| ME | $38,580 | $31,852 | $32,804 |
| WI | $36,340 | $30,441 | $32,698 |
| MN | $38,370 | $31,776 | $32,287 |
| OH | $34,460 | $29,637 | $32,280 |
| ID | $34,790 | $29,143 | $31,877 |
| IN | $35,060 | $29,346 | $31,834 |
| WY | $33,190 | $28,848 | $31,754 |
| CO | $38,540 | $32,160 | $31,721 |
| DC | $42,700 | $35,093 | $31,672 |
| NH | $38,760 | $33,324 | $31,633 |
| IL | $38,060 | $31,022 | $31,381 |
| CT | $38,990 | $32,274 | $31,126 |
| UT | $35,880 | $29,413 | $30,960 |
| MI | $35,000 | $29,066 | $30,861 |
| MA | $40,910 | $33,326 | $30,789 |
| MO | $33,080 | $28,142 | $30,669 |
| AZ | $36,420 | $30,935 | $30,597 |
| TN | $32,130 | $27,996 | $30,262 |
| NY | $39,620 | $32,472 | $30,171 |
| NV | $33,670 | $29,234 | $30,144 |
| MD | $38,040 | $31,302 | $30,108 |
| NJ | $37,090 | $31,401 | $28,839 |
| HI | $38,110 | $31,282 | $28,802 |
| KS | $31,260 | $25,842 | $28,724 |
| DE | $34,320 | $28,418 | $28,632 |
| FL | $33,800 | $29,338 | $28,359 |
| NC | $31,240 | $26,544 | $28,196 |
| SC | $30,110 | $26,073 | $27,982 |
| AR | $27,660 | $23,820 | $27,535 |
| NM | $28,520 | $24,792 | $27,429 |
| OK | $27,710 | $23,683 | $26,825 |
| WV | $28,010 | $24,012 | $26,748 |
| AL | $27,840 | $23,388 | $25,995 |
| CA | $34,320 | $29,248 | $25,979 |
| GA | $29,270 | $24,837 | $25,685 |
| PA | $29,420 | $24,916 | $25,555 |
| VA | $30,300 | $25,544 | $25,355 |
| MS | $23,860 | $20,396 | $23,366 |
| LA | $22,520 | $19,866 | $22,487 |
| TX | $24,230 | $21,563 | $22,190 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for home health and personal care aides as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $35,800, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for home health and personal care aides assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $40,531.
- The price adjustment for home health and personal care aides uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Texas anchors the bottom at $22,190. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for home health and personal care aides, with a national value of $35,800. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for home health and personal care aides assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $40,531, in Washington. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms figures for home health and personal care aides deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.