By Staten Island Senior Advisor Care Team · August 13, 2026
The most-cited senior care cost survey in the country publishes state medians only. Here is what the 2025 New York figures actually say, how to use them responsibly, and the specific gaps to watch for.
Why one number gets quoted everywhere
Search for "assisted living cost New York" and some version of the CareScout Cost of Care Survey figure -- formerly published under the Genworth name -- shows up almost everywhere. It is the most widely cited senior care pricing data in the country, collected annually, and it is genuinely useful for one specific purpose: a state-level benchmark.
What it is not is a Staten Island number, a New York City number, or even a general downstate-versus-upstate breakdown. CareScout surveys and publishes results at the state level only, for every state it covers, including New York. There is no finer-grained figure published anywhere in the primary source.
The actual 2025 New York State figures
For 2025, CareScout's New York State medians are: a non-medical caregiver or home health aide at $35 per hour, or roughly $6,673 per month at a full-time equivalent; adult day health care at $144 per day, or about $3,120 per month; assisted living (private one-bedroom) at $225 per day, or $7,110 per month.
For nursing home care, the semi-private room median is $511 per day, or $15,528 per month; a private room runs $550 per day, or $16,729 per month. A private duty nurse is listed at $150 per visit, with a survey-reported annual figure of $6,240 -- though that annual figure reflects a visit-based calculation, not a full-time-equivalent cost, and should not be treated the same way as the hourly caregiver figure.
All of these figures are published by CareScout as 2025 New York State medians, drawn from its annual Cost of Care Survey -- the same source used across the senior-care industry nationally, and one of the only cost figures in this space that can actually be traced back to a specific, named, repeatable survey methodology rather than an unsourced online estimate.
What these numbers do not capture
A statewide median blends pricing from every county in New York -- rural counties in the Southern Tier alongside Manhattan, Nassau County alongside Staten Island. New York City real estate and labor costs run meaningfully higher than much of the rest of the state, which means Staten Island families should reasonably expect actual quotes to run at or above these state medians, not below them.
The honest, defensible way to use these figures is as a floor for planning purposes -- not a ceiling, and not a specific prediction for what any individual Staten Island community will quote. Get written quotes directly from specific communities rather than budgeting solely around the state median.
This is not a criticism of the survey itself -- state-level data collection is a reasonable and transparent methodology, clearly labeled as such. The problem arises only when a website or a family treats a state median as if it were a Staten Island-specific figure, without noting the gap between the two.
The category that simply does not exist: memory care pricing
This is worth stating plainly because it gets misunderstood constantly: there is no published memory-care cost median for New York, or for any state, in any year of the CareScout survey. Memory care is not surveyed as a separate pricing category at all.
Any "average memory care cost" figure a family finds quoted elsewhere online is therefore either an estimate, a small self-reported sample average, or an extrapolation layered on top of the assisted living figure -- not a genuine survey result. This site does not publish an estimated memory care number, because families make consequential financial decisions based on pages like this one, and an invented figure would do real harm if relied upon.
What changed between 2024 and 2025
The 2024 New York figures, for trend context, were: homemaker/home health aide at $34/hour, adult day health care at $113/day, assisted living at $207/day, nursing home semi-private at $484/day, and nursing home private at $512/day. Comparing those to the 2025 figures shows meaningful year-over-year increases across nearly every category, particularly adult day health care.
One structural change also occurred in the 2025 survey methodology worth noting: the homemaker and home health aide categories, which CareScout had tracked as two loosely related figures in earlier years, are now merged into a single "non-medical caregiver" category. Anyone comparing multi-year cost trends should account for that methodology shift rather than assuming a clean apples-to-apples comparison across every year.
The hourly-to-monthly math families get wrong
A $35/hour caregiver rate sounds manageable until it gets multiplied by real weekly hours. Ten hours a week runs roughly $1,517 a month. Forty hours a week runs roughly $6,067 a month -- already approaching the state's $7,110 assisted living median. Round-the-clock in-home care, at 168 hours a week, runs roughly $25,480 a month, several times the cost of a licensed community.
This crossover point -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 hours a week -- is where many Staten Island families discover that a licensed assisted living community is actually the less expensive option on paper, even setting aside the staffing depth a single hired in-home caregiver cannot match alone overnight.
The same crossover logic applies to adult day health care, at $144/day in the 2025 survey. A family combining adult day health care on weekdays with lighter in-home support on evenings and weekends is often working out a genuinely different cost structure than either option used alone, and running the actual combined numbers -- rather than assuming one approach is categorically cheaper -- is worth the time.
How to actually use these figures when planning
Start with the state median as a floor, not a target. Get written, current quotes from specific Staten Island communities for the exact care level a parent needs, not a generic "starting at" figure. Ask separately about the three-year rate increase history, since a community's current quote says nothing about what it will cost in year two or three.
For nursing home planning specifically, ask for both the private-pay rate and the facility's Medicaid daily rate, since these can differ substantially and both matter depending on how long private funds are expected to last and whether Medicaid coverage might eventually apply.
It also helps to ask a community whether its quoted rate is a starting rate for the lowest care level or an estimate of the all-in cost at a parent's actual current assessed care level -- the two numbers are often very different, and a community's marketed "starting at" figure can understate a realistic monthly cost by a meaningful margin once the actual care assessment is complete.
What Medicaid can change about this number
A CareScout median is a private-pay figure. It says nothing about what a family that qualifies for one of New York's Medicaid long-term-care pathways will actually pay out of pocket, and the two numbers can end up very different. Inside a qualifying Adult Home or Enriched Housing Program setting, New York's Assisted Living Program (ALP), governed by 18 NYCRR Part 494, is Medicaid-funded and covers personal care, home health aides, personal emergency response systems, nursing, therapy and RN case management -- though ALP folds room and board into its rate structure differently than a straightforward per-day figure, so a family should confirm with any specific community what portion of the CareScout-style monthly number ALP would actually offset.
For care delivered at home rather than inside a licensed community, Managed Long Term Care (MLTC) and the Nursing Home Transition and Diversion (NHTD) waiver are the relevant programs -- both administered through NYSDOH, with enrollment in New York City, including Richmond County, mandatory since 2012. Neither pays assisted living room and board, but both can substantially reduce or eliminate the private-pay caregiver-hour math described above for a Medicaid-eligible senior who wants to stay at home.
None of this changes what CareScout publishes -- it changes what a specific family should expect to actually pay once eligibility is established. A household evaluating these numbers should treat the CareScout median as the private-pay starting point, then separately ask NY Medicaid Choice or the local NY Connects office at CASC, (718) 489-3954, what a Medicaid pathway would look like for their specific financial and medical situation.
A worked example: two Staten Island households, two different real numbers
Consider two hypothetical Staten Island households, both looking at the same 2025 CareScout figures. The first is a fully private-pay household choosing between $6,673/month for a full-time non-medical caregiver and $7,110/month for an assisted living private one-bedroom -- close enough that the decision usually comes down to whether round-the-clock supervision, not just full-time daytime hours, is actually needed. At that point the licensed community often wins on value, not just price, because staffing coverage does not depend on one person's schedule.
The second household is Medicaid-eligible and enrolled in MLTC. Its real monthly cost for in-home services is governed by MLTC's own coverage and cost-sharing rules, not by the $35/hour CareScout figure -- for this household, the CareScout number is useful mainly as a planning reference for what private pay would otherwise cost, not as a prediction of an actual bill. The lesson for any Staten Island family: figure out which of these two positions you are actually in before treating a state median as your personal budget.
The bottom line
The 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey is a genuinely useful, primary-sourced benchmark -- and one of the only reliable published cost figures in an industry where most numbers quoted online cannot be traced to any real source. Use it exactly as it was designed to be used: a New York State median, not a Staten Island number, with meaningful local variation on top of it that only a direct quote from a specific community can actually reveal -- and remember that Medicaid pathways like ALP, MLTC and NHTD can change the real number substantially for a household that qualifies.
