The Real Cost of Caregiver Turnover

What does turnover cost your agency?

There’s a high turnover rate in the home care industry. Caregiving isn’t easy, and with limited resources and support, both caregivers and agencies struggle with burnout.

Turnover may be common, but that doesn’t make it less costly.

When you factor in lost shifts, recruiting, training, and admin time, replacing a single caregiver can add up to around $2,600.

If one caregiver turns over, that cost is manageable. When over 80% of caregivers turnover – the average home care turnover rate calculated by the HCAOA calculated in 2024 – those costs quickly start to add up.

The growing need for caregivers

Caregivers aren’t just leaving your agency, they’re leaving the home care industry altogether.

Yet, as more caregivers leave the industry, more people are becoming clients. In the past decade, the population of Americans over 65 grew by nearly 40% – the most rapidly aging population in over a century.

That means that caregivers are leaving at twice the rate that Americans are aging into assistance. With fewer and fewer caregivers, this only puts more pressure on agencies to provide for their clients.

It’s time to invest in quality caregivers – the ones who won’t just stick with your business but will help it grow.

Cutting down on turnover

Turnover is an industry-wide problem… but resilience to it is dependent on each individual agency.

Understanding the root causes of turnover allows you to recruit confidently and set yourself up for long term success.

Caregivers are leaving because…

Across various reports, these are the top 3 causes behind caregiver turnover:

• Caregivers are burned out. Home care is rewarding, but it’s also emotionally and physically draining. It’s important to lay out resources and time to process this work.
• Too much overtime. As caregivers turnover, the remaining caregivers will be called upon to pick up the slack. Too much overtime leaves caregivers feeling overwhelmed – and it costs your agency more.
• Pay is better in other fields. If caregivers don’t meet the hours they need, they’ll leave for more consistent, less stressful, better paying work.

Attracting caregivers

Caregiver turnover may not be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean there’s a simple solution.

Many of the retention issues that plague home care stem from things inherent to home care. You can’t change the fact of the work you do, but you can change how you find and support caregivers.

Feedback from over 600,000 caregiver applicants reveals that these are the top qualities that caregivers appreciate in agencies:

☑️ Location of clients: Being matched with a client who lives within 15 miles of a caregiver makes work easier for the caregiver and the agency.
☑️ Speed of response to application: Interviewing caregivers within 4 days of applying shows them that you’re interested and reliable.
☑️ Flexible schedule: When scheduled efficiently, your agency can have the caregivers who need more work fill in for the caregivers who need less – matching their needs with your own.
☑️ Clear communication from agencies: It’s simple, it’s straightforward, but it makes a huge difference in making your caregivers feel heard.

This all helps to support caregivers and strengthen the relationship they have to you and your agency.

Finding the root of the problem

Ultimately, the person who knows your agency best is you. The more data you’re able to gather around your unique applicant pool, the better prepared you are to recruit and retain caregivers.

To begin to find quality caregivers, here are the types of questions you can ask yourself:

How competitive is the job market in my service area?

Where are my most qualified applicants coming from?

How can I diversify my applicant channel sources?

Which of my job listings are working, and why?

Keeping track of this data empowers agencies to hire smarter, not harder.

At the end of the day, if the home care industry wants to keep caregivers, we need to shift how we find caregivers.

Your relationship with caregivers starts from the moment they apply to your agency. Hire caregivers you trust, support them and help them grow, and reduce turnover.

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Struggling with consistently finding caregivers through Indeed? Check out this video on using Indeed Hiring Insights to boost your recruiting.