What do over 1,000 home-based care providers have in common? They’re all facing industry-specific challenges. Learn what they’re doing to solve them.
Home care is one of the fastest-growing industries in the US right now, but it comes with its own unique challenges separate from any other line of business. After surveying 1,000 home-based care providers, 98,000 home care employees, and 120,000 home care clients, these evidence-based recommendations from the 2025 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report will help you tackle the industry’s most pressing issues of today.
Challenge #3: Business Expenses Rising
The home care industry saw massive growth in the last year. Median revenue rose by $291,315 in the last year, reaching $2.3M, the highest level in six years, and median customer growth rate hit 12.9%—the highest it’s also been in six years. But that kind of growth came at a cost as the median customer acquisition costs also hit a six-year high at $845 per client. It’s getting more expensive to run a home care agency—unless you have the right data to get ahead.
Opportunity: While revenue and growth are up, weekly billable hours are down; meaning it’s worth reevaluating your billing strategy.
Evidence-Based Recommendation: Most providers only bill their clients based on length of visit, while only a third are calculating the bill based on both length-of-visit and professional caregiver skills needed. Also consider implementing premium pricing for sub-three-hour visits to help make sure you’re able to cover all the administrative costs your agency has in addition to your care staff.
Challenge #2: Increasing Industry Competition
Last year, the home care industry saw a 12.9% median customer growth rate—the highest it’s been in six years. While the number of individuals needing care is growing, the number of home care agencies is also increasing. This means it is crucial to understand what differentiates your agency from the competition to stay afloat in the increasing market.
While this is great news to showcase the value of the industry, it also means increased competition for your agency as clients and families are determining who they want to partner with to provide care.
Opportunity: Home care providers ranked strengthening relationships with referral sources as their number one growth opportunity, or top priority this year. With increased competition, one keyway to strengthen relationships with existing referral sources and build relationships with new referral sources is to share your company’s data. Think about how you can differentiate your organization by benchmarking your statistics against your peers and check out our evidence-based recommendation for just one example of how you can use data to leave a lasting impression.
Evidence-Based Recommendation: According to the 2025 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report, only 25% of providers track their hospital readmission rates, but over 90% of seniors say they want to age at home. Your company’s ability to keep your clients in their homes without needing hospitalization is the key differentiator between why prospective clients and referral sources would choose you to take care of their loved ones versus companies that don’t pay attention to those numbers. This is just one example of how you can use stats to set yourself apart from the rest.
Challenge #1: Attracting Enough Referrals
In an industry like home care, reputation is revenue. Almost a quarter of annual revenue comes from word-of-mouth referrals, which is why providers have rated it a top priority for business growth.
Opportunity: At Activated Insights, we help thousands of agencies survey their clients to learn their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to client satisfaction. Looking at the data this year, clients are least satisfied with communication from their provider and rated recommending their provider as their lowest satisfaction score—bad news when the bulk of your company runs off their recommendations to their friends and loved ones. However, clients are most satisfied with the ability of their caregivers; likewise, your staff is most satisfied with client matching compatibility—you can use that. Let me explain how:
Evidence-Based Recommendation: Gathering and acting on feedback drives referrals, which in turn drives company growth and revenue. Survey your clients to use positive feedback about your staff as reviews, proving your quality of service to prospective clients. You can then communicate this feedback back to your staff to affirm their work and highlight what is most important to those in their care. Most importantly, be sure to act on their suggested areas of improvement to become a reliable, referral-worthy home care provider.
Translate Your Business Data into Measurable Impact
For over 16 years, the Activated Insights Benchmarking Report has been helping home-care agencies access the data they need to help make informed business decisions, driven by data, when it comes to recruitment and retention, sales and marketing, training, operations, finance, and customer and employee experience.
Purchase your copy of the 2025 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report, or download our free, easy-to-digest resource to learn about the top six challenges, key findings, and performance benchmarks that matter most to home-based care providers.
Special thanks to Activated Insights for this guest blog.
To learn more about Rosemark’s partnership and integration with Activated Insights, reach out to a member of our team today.