Hundred SummersCare costs calculator: the bill nobody prices until it's urgent
Residential care averages around £57,000 a year today, nursing care £87,000, and care costs inflate faster than prices generally, because care is mostly wages. This calculator compounds the bill to when you might actually need it, on the same cost figures and care-inflation assumption the Hundred Summers app's longevity scenarios charge. Your figures never leave your browser.
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Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Type of care | Residential home |
| Years until care starts | 20 |
| Years of care | 3 |
| Care-cost inflation | 4.0% |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| Cost a year in today's money | £57,000 |
| Cost a year when care starts | £124,894 |
| A week when care starts | £2,402 |
| Total over the care period | £389,869 |
The next question
Who pays if I need a care home? →Care home means test calculator
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guide
- Care home fees: the numbers nobody explains until it's urgent →What care actually costs, the £23,250 means-test line and when the home counts, why councils pay less than you would, and how to stress-test a plan against a late-life care phase.
Why the numbers surprise everyone
Care is the largest unpriced liability in most retirement plans: it arrives late, lands fast (the typical residential stay follows a health event, not a plan), and compounds at wage inflation while your money compounds at market returns minus fees. A three-year residential stay starting in twenty years costs more than £400,000 on these assumptions, and the means test asks whether your assets cover it before the state contributes a pound.
Pricing it is not the same as fearing it: most people never need nursing care, average stays are short, and the right response is usually a plan that could absorb the cost rather than insurance against it (pre-funded care insurance barely exists in the UK; immediate-needs annuities are bought at the point of need). The full Hundred Summers plan treats care as a scenario: your entire plan re-projected with these costs in your final years, funded and taxed from your real accounts, so you see whether the plan survives, not just the size of the bill. The care home fees guide walks the funding system in full.