£13.85 to £15.60 an hour. Travel time paid. That's the whole pitch.
Most care companies won't put a number on a job advert. We've published ours since 2016, along with the mileage rate, the sick pay, the pension and what happens if a client cancels. Read it all below before you decide whether to talk to us.
Amara Okafor answers the recruitment line herself, 8am–6pm. She is the coordinator you'd actually work with, not a call centre.
Sector average is 28%
on every business mile
on real contracts
here more than three years
to first paid shift
Published pay · from 1 April 2026
Our actual pay rates
Not "competitive rates". Not "up to". These are the numbers on the payslips of the 96 people who work here, and they are the same numbers we quote on the phone.
| Role | Weekday | Weekend | Bank holiday |
|---|---|---|---|
| Care Assistant — new to care No experience needed. Fully paid four-day induction. | £13.85 | £14.90 | £27.70 |
| Care Assistant — experienced Six months+ in a care role, or Care Certificate held | £14.40 | £15.50 | £28.80 |
| Senior Care Assistant NVQ 3, medication competency, supervises a small team | £15.60 | £16.80 | £31.20 |
| Live-in carer Per 24 hours, food and accommodation provided | £132 | £145 | £198 |
| Waking night carer 10pm–7am, awake throughout | £15.10 | £16.20 | £30.20 |
| Sleeping night carer Flat shift rate, plus hourly rate for any hour you're woken | £98 | £108 | £146 |
Bank holidays are genuinely double time, not time-and-a-quarter dressed up. Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day are double time and a £60 thank-you payment on top. Somebody has to wash and feed 214 people on Christmas morning, and we think that should be worth more than a card.
The bits other adverts leave out
Travel, mileage and the hours between visits
This is where care pay is quietly lost. An advert says £14 an hour, then you drive four unpaid miles between each call and take home closer to £10. Here is exactly how we handle it.
| Item | What we pay | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Travel time between visits | Paid in full | At your normal hourly rate, from the moment you leave one client to the moment you arrive at the next. It's on the payslip as a separate line so you can check it. |
| Mileage | 45p / mile | The full HMRC rate, paid on every business mile. Not 25p, not "included in your rate". |
| Client cancels at short notice | Full visit paid | If a client goes into hospital or cancels on the day, you are paid for the visit anyway. Losing pay because someone else got ill is not your problem to carry. |
| Contracted hours | Guaranteed | Choose a 16, 24, 30 or 37.5-hour contract. Those hours are guaranteed and paid whether or not we can fill them. Zero-hours contracts are available only if you specifically ask for one — 7 of 96 staff have. |
| Training and shadowing | Paid | Four-day induction, every refresher, every shadow shift, at your normal rate. Including the day you spend on moving & handling in a room in Sale. |
| Holiday | 28 days | Pro rata, rising to 33 days after five years. Calculated on average earnings including overtime, not just base hours. |
| Sick pay | Company scheme | Up to 4 weeks full pay after 12 months' service, on top of statutory. Carers coming to work ill is how outbreaks start. |
| Pension | 6% employer | Double the 3% legal minimum, on qualifying earnings, from day one rather than after three months. |
Why 41% have been here over three years
What the job is actually like
Pay gets people through the door. These are the six things that our October survey said keep people here — and each one costs us money, which is why most providers don't do them.
One-hour visits, minimum
You will never be sent to wash, dress, medicate and feed somebody in fifteen minutes. That model exists to hit a council price, and it makes carers leave the profession entirely.
The same clients, every week
Amara builds rotas around relationships, not gaps. Most carers here have a round of six to nine people they've known for over a year. You will learn their grandchildren's names.
Geographic rounds
Your calls are clustered in one town. Nobody is sent from Partington to Bramhall and back. Average travel between visits across the company last month was six minutes.
Your rota, four weeks ahead
Published on a Friday, four weeks out, and it doesn't change without you agreeing to it. You can book a dentist appointment. You can plan a holiday. This should not be remarkable.
Funded qualifications
Care Certificate in your first twelve weeks, then fully funded NVQ Level 2 and 3 with paid study time. Fourteen of our seniors started here with no care experience at all.
Someone picks up at 2am
Siobhan or a senior holds the out-of-hours phone every single night. If you find a client on the floor at midnight, you are talking to a nurse within ninety seconds — not an answerphone.
Read this bit before you apply
The parts of this job that are genuinely hard
We would rather lose you now than in week three. Roughly one in six people who start in care leave within ninety days, and it's almost always because nobody told them the truth at interview.
- Personal care is personal. You will help people wash, use the toilet and manage continence. It is intimate work and it takes most people a fortnight to stop feeling awkward.
- The hours are unsociable. Care happens at 7am, at teatime and at bedtime. Most rounds are split shifts. Some weekends are unavoidable — everyone here does one in three.
- People you love will die. Clients you've seen five times a week for two years. We give paid time off for a client's funeral and we bring in an outside counsellor monthly, but nothing makes it easy.
- Dementia can be unkind. You may be sworn at, accused of stealing, or not recognised by someone who knew you yesterday. We train for it properly, and no carer is ever expected to absorb aggression alone.
- You need a car. For every round except our two Altrincham town-centre walking rounds. Public transport across Trafford at 7am doesn't work for this job and we won't pretend otherwise.
From our carers
Three people who work here
Recorded for our October staff survey, published with permission and without editing.
I'd done four years at a big agency where you clocked in on an app and the app decided you'd finished in twelve minutes. Here I have nine clients and I know all of them. The travel time thing sounds small until you realise it's about eighty quid a week you were previously giving away for free. I earn roughly £340 a month more than I did, for fewer visits.
Priya Bhandari
Senior Care Assistant · 4 years · Sale round
I came out of retail with no care experience at all and was honestly terrified in week one. They put me shadowing Marie for four full paid days, not the half day I was expecting. Two years on they've paid for my NVQ 3 and I'm doing medication rounds. I'm not going back to a shop floor.
Danny Whelan
Care Assistant · 2 years · Timperley round
It's not perfect — the split shifts are still split shifts and my Tuesday round runs long more often than the rota says it should, which I've told Siobhan about twice. But the rota goes up four weeks ahead and it doesn't get moved, which after eleven years in this sector is the thing I'd genuinely struggle to give up now.
Marie Donnelly
Care Assistant · 6 years · Hale & Bowdon round
Open right now · updated 20 August 2026
Eleven vacancies across four rounds
Every role below is a real gap on a real rota with a named coordinator. If the round you want isn't listed, ring anyway — we hold a waiting list and it moves.
Care Assistant — Altrincham & Hale
Mornings 7am–2pm, or teatime 4pm–9pm
per hour + paid travel + 45p/mile
- 16, 24 or 30 guaranteed hours
- No experience needed
- Car essential
- Coordinator: Amara Okafor
Care Assistant — Sale & Stretford
Mixed rounds, one weekend in three
per hour + paid travel + 45p/mile
- 24 or 37.5 guaranteed hours
- Funded Care Certificate
- One walking round available
- Coordinator: Amara Okafor
Senior Care Assistant — Trafford
NVQ 3 required, supervises 8–10 carers
per hour + on-call allowance
- 37.5 guaranteed hours
- £180 per on-call week
- Funded NVQ 5 pathway
- Reports to: Siobhan Kelly
Live-in Carer — Cheshire & South Manchester
Two weeks on, two weeks off
per 24 hours · food & room provided
- ≈£1,848 per fortnight worked
- Guaranteed 2-hour daily break
- Travel to placement paid
- Two years' experience required
A note on sponsorship. We are not a Home Office licensed sponsor and cannot sponsor visas. You'll need an existing right to work in the UK. We'd rather say that here than take your application and waste three weeks of your time.
Fourteen days, start to first shift
How applying actually works
No online personality test. No video interview with a robot. You ring Amara, and if it sounds right you come in and meet people.
A ten-minute call
With Amara, on the number at the top of this page. She'll ask what hours you can do and which town suits you, and answer anything you want about pay.
A coffee, not an interview
Half an hour at the Stamford New Road office with Siobhan. There's no panel and no whiteboard. We're working out whether you'd be kind at seven in the morning.
DBS and references
We pay for the enhanced DBS. It usually clears in eight days. Two references — one can be personal if you've been out of work.
Four paid induction days
Then four paid shadow shifts alongside an experienced carer on the round you'll be taking on. You go solo when you say you're ready, not when the rota says so.
Straight answers
What applicants ask Amara
Genuinely fine. Thirty-one of our 96 carers had no care experience when they started, including two of our five seniors. We recruit for patience and reliability, because everything else is teachable and neither of those is.
What we can't teach is turning up at 7am on a wet Tuesday in February when you'd rather not. If you've held down shift work, retail, hospitality or raised children while working, you already have most of what this job needs.
A typical 30-hour contract on the Altrincham round, including one weekend in three and paid travel time, comes out at roughly £470 gross a week — about £24,400 a year. Mileage is on top of that and is not taxed, and usually runs £30–£45 a week.
Our seniors on 37.5 hours with an on-call week each month are on roughly £33,600. We'll talk you through your own numbers on the first call rather than making you guess.
Partly, and we'll be honest about the limits. There is genuine daytime work — companionship calls, lunch visits, shopping and appointments — and nineteen of our carers work a 9.30am–2.30pm pattern in term time.
But the busiest hours in home care are 7–10am and 4–9pm, so a school-hours-only round is smaller and usually caps out around 20 hours. If you can do two teatimes a week as well, we can offer you a lot more.
For most rounds, yes, and we won't take you on and then quietly hope you'll manage. The exceptions are our two walking rounds — one in Altrincham town centre and one covering the Sale Moor estates — where every client is within fifteen minutes on foot. Both are currently full, but people move on and we keep a list.
If you're mid-way through learning to drive, tell us. We've held roles open for people three months from a test before.
Because we charge families enough to pay carers properly, and we say so on our prices page. A provider charging £24 an hour cannot pay £14 an hour plus travel time, mileage, a 6% pension and company sick pay. The arithmetic simply doesn't work, so something gets cut — and it's usually your travel time.
The 11% figure is real and we publish it whether it's good or not. It was 17% in 2022 after we lost four carers to a hospital trust in one month.
Then you tell us and you leave, and there's no hard feeling in it. Care isn't for everyone and finding that out in week two is a perfectly reasonable outcome — you'll have been paid for every hour including the induction.
What we'd ask is that you finish the week so we can cover your clients properly. Somebody is expecting you at half seven on Thursday.
Ring Amara. Ask her the awkward questions.
You don't need a CV to have the first conversation, and there's no follow-up call if you decide against it. She's on the phone 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.