The median cost of an assisted living community climbed 5% over the past year to $6,200 a month, or $74,400 annually, according to the 2025 Cost of Care Survey that CareScout, a senior-care subsidiary of Genworth Financial, released in March. That marks a sharp slowdown from the double-digit increase the same survey recorded in 2024, when senior-care pricing accelerated well beyond the broader inflation rate. Even at a calmer pace, though, the added roughly $300 a month keeps widening a gap that already outstrips a typical retiree’s income: the new median annual bill runs close to triple the average Social Security retirement benefit paid out this year.
A Cost Tied to Rents, Not Wages
CareScout’s survey attributes the pattern to a specific mechanism rather than a general cost-of-living squeeze. The company reported that assisted living pricing continues to track closely with broader rental housing trends, because the monthly rate bundles a room-and-board charge on top of personal care services. That distinguishes assisted living from higher-acuity settings, where the same survey pointed to workforce and staffing pressure, not rent, as the primary driver of cost.
That distinction matters for how far the current moderation can be trusted to hold. A skilled-nursing wage settlement or a Medicaid reimbursement change would speak directly to nursing-home pricing, but assisted living operators set rates against apartment and single-family rental markets in the metropolitan areas CareScout surveys — a variable with its own cycles that have nothing to do with the size of the home health aide workforce or hospital staffing levels. A rebound in regional rents, not any change in caregiving costs, could just as easily push the growth rate back into double digits.
The room-and-board framing also explains why assisted living communities, unlike nursing homes, can pass through a regional rent increase to residents even in a year when direct caregiving costs are flat. A community operator in a market where apartment rents are rising can raise its monthly rate to match, independent of what it pays its aides — a pricing lever nursing homes use far less, since a larger share of their bill covers licensed nursing labor that is priced through Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rather than local real estate.
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Where a Six-Figure Bill Still Beats the Alternative
Assisted living remains the least expensive setting on CareScout’s list that provides round-the-clock supervision, a comparison that puts the new median in perspective. A semi-private room in a nursing home now runs a national median of $315 a day, or $114,975 a year, up 2%; a private room costs $355 a day, or $129,575 annually, up 1%. Both figures are more than half again the assisted living median, and CareScout tied their slower percentage growth directly to ongoing inflationary and workforce pressures in higher-acuity care settings rather than to any softening in nursing-home demand.
In-home care complicates the comparison further. The national median hourly rate for a non-medical caregiver rose 3% to $35 an hour, which totals $80,080 a year at 44 hours of care a week — a full-time schedule that already costs more than the assisted living median despite being billed hourly rather than as a flat monthly rate. Households that need fewer hours of support can spend far less than the assisted living figure, but those needing near-constant supervision at home can end up paying more than they would in a community setting.
Adult day health care was the outlier this year, with its national median daily rate falling 5% to $95, or $24,700 annually based on five days of use a week. CareScout linked the decline to Medicaid reimbursement rates, which serve as a benchmark for private-pay pricing in many markets — a reminder that public program rules, not just rents or wages, can pull a private care cost down as easily as up.
The national figure also obscures sizable geographic variation, since CareScout collects rates at the metropolitan-area level rather than publishing a single number that applies everywhere. A metro area with tight apartment supply and high land costs can price assisted living well above the $6,200 median, while a lower-cost region can fall well below it — variation the annual survey is designed to capture area by area, even though its headline number necessarily averages the differences away.
The Income Gap Behind the Median
The starkest comparison is not across care settings but against retirement income itself. The Social Security Administration’s own figures put the estimated average monthly retirement benefit at $2,071 for January 2026, or about $24,852 a year — meaning the new assisted living median of $74,400 runs roughly three times what the average retired worker collects from Social Security alone. That ratio barely moved even as the survey’s headline growth rate slowed, because a smaller percentage increase on a larger base still outpaces a benefit that adjusts only with the annual cost-of-living increase.
CareScout collected more than 25,000 provider rates for the 2025 survey between July and November, giving the median real statistical weight rather than treating it as an anecdote from a handful of communities. The company, whose parent Genworth also sells long-term-care insurance, frames the annual release as evidence that families need to plan funding sources years before a care decision becomes urgent — a case the underlying numbers support regardless of who is making it, since Social Security and pension income alone rarely covers the gap the survey documents.
What the 2025 data does not resolve is whether the deceleration holds. Because assisted living pricing is pegged to rental housing rather than clinical wages, its trajectory now depends on a different set of markets than the ones driving nursing-home or in-home care costs — and those rental markets, unlike a hospital wage settlement, are not something any single annual survey can forecast a year in advance.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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