A semi-private room in a nursing home cost a national median of $114,975 a year in CareScout’s 2025 Cost of Care Survey, or $315 a day. CareScout released the results on March 2, 2026, from rates collected between July and November 2025. A private room ran $129,575 a year, and both figures rose from the prior survey.
A national median from more than 25,000 rates
The CareScout release says the 2025 edition of a survey first run in 2004 gathered more than 25,000 rates at the metropolitan-statistical-area level. Every figure in it is a national median, meaning the midpoint of the rates collected rather than an average. Half the rates sat above $315 a day for a semi-private room.
Semi-private nursing-home care rose 2% from the prior survey. The private room, at $355 a day, rose 1%. The release does not name a state or city, so $114,975 is a benchmark for comparison, and a facility in a high-cost metro area can price well above it while a rural one comes in lower.
For families pricing care, the figure is the starting line for a conversation with a specific facility. A semi-private room means a shared room, so the median describes the cheaper way to buy a nursing-home bed. Anyone who wants a private room should plan against the higher number, $129,575.
The two rooms differ by $40 a day. Over a full year, that gap is $14,600, the exact difference between the semi-private and private annual medians. The annual figure is the daily rate multiplied across 365 days, so a stay shorter than a year costs proportionally less, and a longer one costs more each added month.
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How the other care settings in the survey compare
Assisted living had a national median of $6,200 a month, or $74,400 a year, up 5%. That was the fastest increase among the categories in the release. Adult day health care, five days a week, ran $95 a day or $24,700 a year, and it fell 5%.
Home care is now reported as a non-medical caregiver, a category that combines homemaker and home health aide services. CareScout put the median at $35 an hour, or $80,080 a year at 44 hours a week, up 3%. A private duty nurse, new to the survey in 2025, was $90 an hour or $160 a visit, with no prior-year comparison.
Lined up that way, a nursing-home bed at $114,975 sits above assisted living by $40,575 a year and above 44 hours a week of paid caregiver time by $34,895. The difference is what skilled, round-the-clock staffing costs. It is also the setting where Medicare’s rules matter most.
Medicare covers a short skilled stay, not the long one
Medicare.gov says Medicare does not provide long-term care coverage or custodial care unless medical care is needed. Long-term care is non-medical in that definition, and Medicare and most health insurance, Medigap included, do not pay for it, whether in a nursing home or at home.
What Medicare does pay for is a skilled nursing facility stay after a hospital admission. Under Medicare’s skilled nursing facility rules, the person needs an inpatient hospital stay of at least three days in a row, and observation or emergency-room time does not count. Days 1 through 20 cost $0 per day after the $1,736 Part A deductible.
Days 21 through 100 carry a 2026 coinsurance of $217 each day, which comes to $17,360 across all 80 of those days. From day 101, Medicare says the patient pays all costs. Against a $315 median day, the benefit ends exactly where a long stay is just getting started.
Medicare.gov adds that Medicare Advantage plans may have different cost-sharing for skilled nursing care, so a member of one has to check the plan’s own schedule. The 2026 amounts above apply to Original Medicare. None of them covers a stay that is custodial from the first day, such as help with bathing and dressing without a skilled need.
Where the bill goes after day 100
Medicare.gov names two remaining routes for long-term care: Medicaid, depending on the state’s requirements, or private long-term care insurance. Everything else is paid by the family. Medicaid’s rules vary by state, so the first practical step is a call to the state Medicaid office about its limits on income and assets.
The survey figure sets the scale for that planning. At $114,975 a year, a three-year stay would come to $344,925 at the 2025 median, before any price increases, and the survey shows rates moving up each year for semi-private care. Those totals are arithmetic on one year’s median, not a forecast.
What the CareScout and Medicare numbers leave unsettled is the day after day 100. The median says what a semi-private bed cost in 2025, and Medicare.gov says who pays for the first 100 days. Which of the remaining routes covers the rest depends on a family’s savings, insurance and state.
Who pays when Medicare stops at day 100?
A nursing-home bill of $315 a day arrives long before most families have chosen how to pay it. Medicare’s 100-day limit and Medicaid’s look-back rules punish decisions made in a hurry.
Protect Your Savings From Care Costs explains what Medicare pays for nursing care, and what it won’t, and Medicaid’s 5-year look-back before anything is given away. It also shows how the at-home spouse is protected, with the 2026 numbers.
The 10-page guide puts the four ways care gets paid for side by side and ends with a care-plan worksheet a family fills in together, in a large-print edition.
Get the guide to Medicare’s nursing-home limits and the family care-plan worksheet →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
