Would I Start a Homecare Business in 2026?

On a discovery call last week, someone asked me a question I’ve been thinking about ever since.

“Ben, is now actually a good time to start a homecare business?”

It’s the right question to ask. And it deserves an honest, practical answer rather than a founder taking selfies and cheerleading from the sidelines.

So here it is.

The headwinds are real.

The cost of living crisis hasn’t gone away. Economic uncertainty is making people cautious about big financial decisions, and investing your savings into a new business is about as big as it gets.

Care is an essential purchase – if you need it, you need it. But people can try to delay organising care for longer due to the cost. Equally, they can also delay moving into a care home for as long as possible for the same reason, meaning that you might have larger packages of care for longer.

Local authority funding remains tight, NHS discharge pressures are intense, and the regulatory bar, rightly, keeps rising.

And anyone telling you it’s all plain sailing is either not paying attention or trying to sell you something.

And yet.

Look at this graph. It shows inbound enquiries to our website over the last seven months, phone calls and web forms combined.

That’s not a blip. That’s a trend. Demand for quality homecare is not softening, it’s growing. The underlying demographics driving that demand (an ageing population, a preference for staying at home, overstretched families) aren’t going anywhere.

On staffing, let’s be straight: finding and keeping great care professionals remains one of the biggest constraints in this sector. It always has been. But contrary to the narrative you might be hearing, we’re not finding it materially harder than a few years ago. Operators who’ve invested in their employer brand and built genuinely rewarding places to work are holding their own.

The winding down of visa sponsorship routes has removed a lot of artificial noise from the market, and in some ways levelled the playing field for quality providers.

When we surveyed our existing franchise partners anonymously through our Workbuzz survey, 88% either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “The long-term prospects for my franchise business are very good.” Not a leading question. Not a show of hands in a room full of people. Anonymous. 88%. That satisfaction and those feedback scores also helped us pick up the Best Franchise Management Category award at the Best Franchise Awards in 2025, which meant a lot to the whole team.

So what do the headwinds actually mean for you?

Here’s my honest thoughts.

The headwinds hurt the wrong kind of homecare business. The ones built on thin margins and volume over quality. The ones where the owner isn’t really in the business. The ones that treated visa sponsorship as a recruitment strategy rather than building a genuinely attractive place to work.

For the right kind of homecare business, quality-led, relationship-driven, properly supported, the current environment is quietly becoming more favourable, not less. Weaker operators are exiting. Referrers are becoming more discerning. Families are willing to pay for providers they can actually trust.

The bar to entry is rising. That’s not a bad thing if you’re prepared to clear it.

The question isn’t really “is 2026 the right time?”

It’s whether you are the right person, with the right support, to build something that will genuinely thrive in this environment.

That’s a harder question. And it’s the one I’d rather spend a conversation on.

If you want to have that conversation, honestly, no pressure, you can book a discovery call here.

Cheers, Ben