The real cost of home care for a parent in Israel in 2026

When a family first asks what a caregiver costs, they are usually told the salary. That is half the answer. On top of it come statutory payments that most people discover after signing, and together they add 20–35%.

Live-in care

The base salary for a live-in foreign worker sits between ₪6,000 and ₪8,000 a month. The spread reflects experience, languages and willingness to take a heavy case: someone with verified dementia experience asks ₪300–600 more, and fairly so.

Then there is what people forget to count:

• The licensed agency fee — up to ₪2,000 once and up to ₪70 a month. Payable whether you found the person yourself or not. It is a state-regulated charge, not a middleman's commission.
• The worker's health insurance — mandatory, arranged by the employer.
• Contributions — Bituach Leumi at 3.6%, pension and severance accruals. Roughly 10–12% of salary in total.
• Rest days and holidays — 25 consecutive hours of weekly rest and nine paid public holidays a year. Someone has to cover that, at ₪400–600 a day.
• Annual leave — 14 to 24 days depending on seniority.

The total burden on the family, before the benefit is deducted, comes to ₪8,500 – 11,500 a month.

Hourly care

An Israeli worker charges ₪60–100 an hour. The centre of the country runs 20–30% above the periphery. Weekends and holidays carry a 25–50% premium, and the minimum shift is almost always four hours.

At twenty hours a week that is roughly ₪5,200–8,700 a month — so it is not always cheaper than live-in care, as people tend to assume.

What the state covers

The long-term care benefit runs from ₪1,659 at level 1 to ₪7,241 at level 6. It depends on the assessed dependency level and on whether you employ a foreign or an Israeli worker: from level 3 upwards, an Israeli worker attracts a higher benefit.

One detail many families miss: the benefit can be taken as cash into your own account instead of hours from a care company. You then employ the person directly and skip the company's margin — usually a difference of ₪800–1,200 a month.

For comparison

A nursing home in Israel costs about ₪23,000 a month. Even at the top of the home-care range with no benefit at all, the gap is roughly two to one — and with dementia, quality of life at home is almost always better, because a change of environment accelerates disorientation.