Hiring privately genuinely costs less per hour. What it also does is make you the employer, and most families do not price that until something goes wrong.
Per hour, yes. Overall it depends on what you count. Hiring directly makes you the employer: you handle screening, taxes and withholding, insurance and liability, and you personally find cover when that person is ill, on holiday or quits. An agency charges more per hour and absorbs those. Neither is automatically right — it turns on how much risk and administration you want to carry.
The hourly saving is real and it is the reason people do it. What comes with it is a set of responsibilities most families have never carried before.
You become an employer. That means screening the person yourself, handling tax and withholding obligations, carrying the liability if they are injured in your parent's home, and being the one who finds a replacement at 6am when they call in sick.
The last one is the one that bites. A single caregiver has no backup. When they are ill, on holiday, or simply stop coming, the entire arrangement stops that day — and you are the cover.
Neither column is the right answer for everyone:
Read it with that in mind, which is why the private column is stated as fairly as we can. Plenty of families do hire directly and do fine. The question is whether you want to be an employer.
No backup. One person means the arrangement has a single point of failure, and it fails on the day you can least absorb it.
Some families do — a private caregiver for the regular hours and an agency for cover and overnights. Tell us if that is the shape of it and we will work with it.
Do it properly rather than informally. Fingerprint-based background screening is a meaningfully higher bar than a name-based online search.
Personal Touch Home Care provides non-medical in-home care. Our caregivers assist with daily living, safety and companionship. They do not provide nursing, wound care, injections, physical therapy or any service requiring a licensed clinician. If that is what is needed, it is a home health agency, and we will tell you so.
Call and describe what is happening at home. We will tell you what we can do, what we cannot, and what it would take.
