The honest math is this: multiply the hours of help your parent needs each week by our flat rate of $30–34 an hour, and set that figure beside the written monthly quote from a community. At a few hours a day, home is almost always the smaller number. Somewhere around eight or more hours every day, the two figures begin to cross. What decides the question is not the crossing point but what each figure leaves out.
This is not our price list, and it is not about dementia. It is the arithmetic families in Preston Hollow and North Dallas actually do at the kitchen table with a legal pad, usually after the second fall or the third call from a worried neighbor. We would like that arithmetic to be right, because a decision made on the wrong numbers gets undone at great expense a year later.
How do you calculate the cost of staying home?
Start with hours, not with a feeling. Walk through an ordinary week and write down when your parent genuinely needs another adult in the house: the morning shower, lunch, the drive to a Tuesday appointment, the evening when she gets unsteady. Then group those needs into visits. Our minimum visit is four hours, and one flat hourly rate applies whether the hours fall on a weekday morning, a Saturday, or overnight. There is no higher rate for nights and no care level that pushes the price up as needs grow.
Because the rate is flat and published, the table below is the entire calculation. Weekly cost is hours multiplied by $30–34. The monthly column multiplies the weekly figure by 4.33, the average number of weeks in a month, and rounds to the nearest ten dollars.
| Hours per week | What it looks like | Per week | Per month (approx.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | Three four-hour visits a week | $360–408 | $1,560–1,770 |
| 20 | Five four-hour visits, weekdays | $600–680 | $2,600–2,940 |
| 28 | Four hours every day | $840–952 | $3,640–4,120 |
| 40 | Eight hours, weekdays | $1,200–1,360 | $5,200–5,890 |
| 56 | Eight hours every day, or two four-hour visits daily | $1,680–1,904 | $7,270–8,240 |
| 84 | Twelve waking hours every day | $2,520–2,856 | $10,910–12,370 |
| 168 | Around-the-clock, rotating awake caregivers | $5,040–5,712 | $21,820–24,730 |
Two things stand out. The jump from four hours a day to twelve is not a step, it is a tripling. And the bottom row, 24-hour home care with rotating caregivers, is a different category of decision. It is the row where families most often find that a community's quote is lower on paper. We do not offer live-in care, so around-the-clock help at home means awake caregivers working in shifts, billed at the same hourly rate as a Tuesday morning.
What does the community's monthly quote actually include?
Ask for it in writing and read it slowly. Each community quotes its own rate and no two are built alike, but most monthly figures share a structure: a base rent for the apartment, a fee for meals and housekeeping, and a care level on top.
The care level is the part to understand before anyone signs. Communities assess a new resident and assign a tier, something like light, moderate or extensive help, and the monthly figure rises as the tier rises. That is honest pricing, but it moves in one direction. A parent who moves in at the lightest tier and needs more help a year later pays more for the same apartment. Our rate does not work that way. Whether a caregiver is making lunch or helping with a shower and a transfer, the hour costs the same, which is why families comparing personal care at home against a community should always ask what the next tier up costs.
Ask, too, what is not in the quote: the community fee or move-in deposit, incontinence supplies, a medication management charge, escorts to appointments, and whether a second person in the same apartment pays a full second care fee. Write each of those in the margin beside the headline number.
What does the home figure hide?
The hours table is honest about the hours, but a fair comparison has a second column that families forget to fill in. The home figure does not include the house: property taxes, insurance, utilities, the roof, the yard service, and whatever it now costs to keep a large house running for one person who uses three rooms of it. For a Preston Hollow family whose parents paid the house off decades ago, that is often a modest number, and the house is an asset rather than a cost. For a parent still carrying a mortgage, it is a real line.
The home figure also assumes the hours are right. Families tend to underestimate at the start, then add a visit, then add a morning. That is normal, and it is why we work without long-term contracts, but it means the row you circle today is a starting estimate rather than a ceiling. For a worked example of how the hourly rate becomes a weekly bill, see our page on the cost of in-home care in Dallas–Fort Worth.
Finally, home care hours cover the hours. Between visits the house is quiet. If your parent is safe alone in those stretches, that quiet is exactly what she wants. If she is not, the honest number is a larger one, and it is better to know that now.
What does the community figure hide?
Three things, mostly.
- The move itself. Selling a house in North Dallas is not free: the commission, the repairs a buyer demands, the estate sale, the movers, and the weeks a family member spends managing all of it. If the plan is to keep the house, the community quote sits on top of the house costs rather than replacing them.
- The second person. When a couple moves together and only one needs care, the well spouse pays to live somewhere built around the other one's needs. At home, one caregiver can help both people in the same house, and a couples discount applies when one caregiver is supporting two people.
- The rising care level. The quote you receive is for today's assessment. Ask what the next tier costs, and the one after that, because that is the number you will be paying within a couple of years.
Where is the tipping point?
There is no single number of hours at which staying home stops making financial sense, because each community sets its own price and quotes vary enormously across Dallas. But there is a method. Take the written monthly quote, add the care level you expect in two years, and find the row in the table it falls between. Every row above it is where home costs more than moving. Every row below it is where home costs less.
Picture a common situation. A widowed father in his eighties needs someone in the house for the morning routine and again in the evening: two four-hour visits a day, seven days a week, which is 56 hours. The table puts that around $7,270–8,240 a month. If the community's quote at his expected care level is higher, home is cheaper. If it is lower, the community is cheaper on paper, and the real question becomes whether he is safe alone in the middle of the day and overnight, and how much the family values the house on the corner he has lived in for forty years.
In our experience, families in the neighborhoods around Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas and Medical City Dallas usually land somewhere between the 28-hour and 56-hour rows, and in that range the home figure holds up well once the community's care tier is included. Where the math turns is the 84-hour row and above. At twelve waking hours a day, every day, a family should be comparing carefully, and at 24-hour care the comparison is genuinely close and depends on the specific community.
What is in the non-financial column?
The legal pad has a second page, and it matters more than the first. Families who do the money math and stop there make decisions they regret in both directions.
- The house. The garden, the kitchen she can navigate in the dark, the neighbors who have watched the street for thirty years. For some parents this is the whole argument. For others the house has become a burden they would be glad to put down.
- One caregiver versus many. At home your parent sees the same matched caregiver, or a small rotation. In a community the staff changes by shift and by turnover.
- Company. A community offers a dining room, activities and other people. A parent who is isolated at home may thrive there; a private, quiet person may not.
- Control. At home the schedule is hers: breakfast at nine, the news at six, the bath when she wants it. Communities run on a shared timetable.
- Your own hours. A daughter managing a parent's care from across town or across the country spends real time either way. Be honest about which arrangement costs you less of it.
- Reversibility. Home care can start this week and stop next month. A move is expensive to undo.
How do Dallas families actually decide?
Slowly, and usually in stages. The pattern we see most often is a family that starts with a few visits a week, discovers what actually helps, and adjusts. A North Dallas daughter who assumed her mother needed all-day help often finds that mornings and a standing Thursday errand run are the whole problem. A Preston Hollow son who thought two visits a week would do sometimes finds his father needs an evening presence more than anything, which a flat rate makes easy to add.
Staying home is rarely a permanent decision, and it does not need to be one. Our home care in Preston Hollow and home care in North Dallas pages describe what visits in those neighborhoods commonly involve and which hospitals our caregivers drive to, and the Dallas home care page covers the rest of the city. A free in-home assessment is the practical next step, because the hours column is far easier to fill in after someone has walked through the house with you.
If the numbers do end up favoring a move, that is a legitimate answer, and we will say so at the assessment. What we will not do is let the arithmetic be done wrong in either direction. Personal care at home is worth it when the hours are honest, the house is a place your parent still wants to be, and the family's own time is counted as the real cost it is.
This is general information to help families compare options, not financial or medical advice. Whether your parent is safe at home is a question for her physician, and a community's quote should always be confirmed in writing with that community.
