Methodology

• Official — taken directly from a government source (the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau). Rendered plain, cited verbatim, linked to the source.
• Derived — simple arithmetic on official numbers: a share, a sum, an hourly equivalent of a per-15-minute rate. The math is disclosed next to the figure.
• HomecareHQ analysis — our own estimates, always badged, always with the sample size and date window that produced the number. Today that's the monthly job-postings analysis and the cross-agency financial benchmarks.

Every figure also shows its data vintage ("as of May 2025"), because honest data has an age. When a fresher official release lands, new numbers replace old ones and the old ones are kept as history — nothing is silently edited.

• Caregiver pay — the U.S. government's occupational wage survey (BLS OEWS), covering home health and personal care aides in every state and hundreds of metro areas. Updated yearly by BLS, republished here each release.
• Advertised pay & benefits — HomecareHQ's monthly analysis of live caregiver job ads (details below).
• VA home care rates — the published VA fee schedule: the maximum VA pays community providers for each covered service, by payment region. These are ceilings, so every figure reads "up to."
• Veteran population — the Census Bureau's American Community Survey: veterans per county and state, including the 65-and-older group.
• Agency financial benchmarks — aggregated from public franchise disclosure documents (see the next section).
• Glossary — hand-curated by our editors, not scraped.

HCHQ Benchmark Research transforms recent public operating disclosures into standardized, location-weighted benchmarks for the home care industry. HCHQ independently collects, standardizes, and synthesizes this data — the value is the collection, interpretation, normalization, comparability mapping, and weighting, not merely access to the filings.

The current benchmark set incorporates publicly reported operating metrics from seven national home care systems, collectively representing hundreds of agency locations (545 for the gross-margin benchmark). HCHQ maps differently named measures to a common operating definition and weights brand-level results according to the number of locations each represents. Because source definitions and reporting methods vary, benchmarks are location-weighted medians of disclosed brand-level metrics — directional industry baselines, not exact like-for-like comparisons, and never claims of location-level observations.

Three rules apply everywhere a benchmark appears on this site:

• Real-location pools are labeled as such, with the location and company counts behind them — and single-location and multi-territory operations never mix in one number.
• Every benchmark carries methodology caveats (cohort exclusions, revenue-definition variance, estimated inputs). The full caveat registry renders below on this page; each card links here.
• Vintages are disclosed. Benchmarks refresh with each annual filing cycle and are dated to the performance year they describe.

Advertised-pay and benefits numbers come from caregiver job ads posted in the last 30 days, pulled monthly for every tracked metro using the searches a real applicant would run: caregiver, home care aide, HHA, PCA home care, CNA home care. Duplicates are removed; then an AI classifier reads each full ad — not just the employer name — and keeps only home care agencies (no hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living, staffing registries, or families hiring directly). Every surviving ad counts toward the ad total and benefit percentages; pay stats use only the ads that disclosed a wage, and both counts always render together. Below 25 pay-disclosing ads a market gets a "small sample" flag and no pay ranges — a shaky percentile would undermine every honest number around it.

Spotted an error? We correct fast. Write to us via the contact page — corrections ship with the next daily rebuild, and material ones are noted here.