Assisted Living vs. Home Health: How to Choose the Right Care Option
Apr 13, 2026
Trying to figure out long-term care can feel confusing. You might be wondering if assisted living or home health is the better choice for you or someone you love. I’ve walked through this with many people, and the answer is usually simpler than it seems.
Want the full breakdown? Watch the video belowπ
What Assisted Living Really Provides Day to Day
Assisted living is all about helping with daily life. This includes things like getting dressed, bathing, eating, and taking medication. I’ve seen how powerful this support can be when someone just needs a little help to stay safe and comfortable.
The big difference is that assisted living is 24/7 care. Someone is always there. Residents live in the home, and the staff supports them all day and night.
You also get meals, activities, and a full care team working together. It is not just care, it is a full living experience.
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Help with daily tasks like bathing, dressing, and reminders
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24/7 staff support and supervision
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Meals, activities, and a built-in community
How Home Health Lets You Stay Independent
Home health is very different. Instead of moving somewhere, you stay in your own home. This is a huge benefit for people who value comfort and independence.
I think about my grandpa here. He wants to stay at home no matter what. He enjoys his space, his routine, and even working on his 3D printer. For him, that independence matters more than anything.
With home health, a caregiver comes to you. They help with specific needs like therapy, medication, or light care. But they are not there all the time.
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Care happens during scheduled visits
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Support is personalized to your needs
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You stay in your home and keep your routine
π‘ This option works best when someone does not need constant supervision.
The Real Cost Difference Most People Miss
A lot of people think assisted living is too expensive. They see numbers like $5,000 to $10,000 per month and feel shocked. I get it, I hear this all the time.
But here is what most people miss. Assisted living bundles everything together. Housing, meals, care, and activities are all included in one monthly price.
Home health, on the other hand, charges by the hour.
That means if you only need a little help, it can be affordable. But if you need more care, the cost adds up fast.
Let’s keep it simple. If care costs $100 per hour and you need full-time help, that could be:
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$2,400 per day
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$60,000 per month
Even at lower hourly rates, it can still become very expensive.
π‘ Assisted living often becomes the better value when someone needs ongoing or full-time care.
Choosing Based on What the Person Actually Needs
This is the most important part. There is no “best” option for everyone. The right choice depends on the person.
If someone needs constant care, enjoys social time, and benefits from structure, assisted living is usually the better fit. They get community, support, and safety all in one place.
If someone values independence and only needs help with a few things, home health makes more sense. They can stay in their home and keep control of their daily life.
I’ve seen both work really well when the choice is based on real needs, not just cost or fear.
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Choose assisted living for full support and community
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Choose home health for independence and light support
You Can Even Combine Both for Better Results
Here is something most people do not think about. You do not always have to pick just one.
I have worked with people who start with home health, then move into assisted living later. It creates a natural path as care needs grow.
From a business side, this can even work together. Home health can become a way to build relationships and eventually transition residents into assisted living when they need more care.
π‘ Thinking long-term can help you make a smarter decision today.
Wrap Up
At the end of the day, this decision is about care, comfort, and quality of life. Assisted living gives full support and community, while home health protects independence and flexibility.
The best choice is the one that matches the person’s real needs right now, and where they are heading next.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the Free Business Plan Checklist.
And if you’re ready to figure out your next step, join me for the next Roadmap Challenge, where I’ll walk you through how to get started.
Show full transcript π
Transcript
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Are you interested in long-term care, but you're not sure if assisted living or nursing homes or home health is the best option for you? If that's something you've been trying to figure out for a while now, this video is for you. So, make sure you stick around. Hey friend, I'm Brandon Gustafson. I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives to help them reach their goals and financial dreams. Super excited to be
00:00:32 - 00:01:15
here on the channel with you as we get into assisted living versus home health. So, make sure you stick around to help you out with this. Before we get started, I do want to tell you at the end of the video, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my roadmap challenge. If you want to learn more, though, go to roadmapchallenge.com. And if you need some help and some guidance and you're not sure which of my programs are going to help you out, go take my 30 secondond quiz at aliquiz.com.
00:00:54 - 00:01:44
We'd love to see you over there. There's going to be a QR code for you uh down here in the bottom of the screen. Uh just go scan that or go to aliquiz.com. All right, let's get into it. Today uh again, we are talking about assisted living and home health. Kind of evaluating those options to see which of those are going to be best. And this can be really helpful for those of you that are just like trying to decide for your family member which of these options are going to be a good fit for what I need
00:01:18 - 00:02:14
to do for my loved one. And it's also going to help those of you that are business owners and you're trying to decide, you know, which of these paths is is a good fit for me because I have talked to people who own home health agencies. My great uncle actually had a franchise business that did this. I own assisted living facilities. I think you get to do incredible work. But I also think there is a lot of just kind of misunderstanding around what actually exists in this industry and how you can
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leverage these things to help people who are in need while also creating a profitable business for you to create that prosperity, purpose and peace in your life. So the first thing I want to talk to you about is assisted living. What is assisted living? At its core, when you are offering assisted living services, you are offering assistance with activities of daily living. So, this could be dressing, toileting, bathing, feeding, just anything uh that you're doing on a daily basis and you need some help with. Maybe you have
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arthritic hands or the resident has arthritic hands. Uh maybe they have a bit of a mental block and they need reminders to go, "Hey, you're you're kind of stinky. Go take a shower. You know, it's your turn to take a shower. Uh, make sure you go get dressed today. Make sure you take your medication. Those little types of reminders. That's what we do in assisted living. We also in assisted living offer 247 coverage because people are in our homes. They they live there full-time. We have we
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are fully staffed 24/7 as well. Uh, depending on your state, it's going to determine how many staff you need. So, if you're interested in learning about staffing ratios, just type in ratio down below. We'll do a separate video for you on that. But what you're going to find is in assisted living, you're going to have 24/7 coverage. So if something does go bad, you've got somebody there to help out, to help lift you up if you fall, help you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you know, those
00:03:14 - 00:04:07
types of things. That's what we do in assisted living. We provide meals. The way that the licensing works, we are required to provide three meals per day plus snacks. So, we buy the food, we prepare the food, we offer the food to the residents. If there are special dietary needs or special diets that a resident needs to be on, we're working through that with their care plan and with their doctors and and nurses and things like that. This care team, we're coming together. We're making sure that
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there's proper nutrition in place and and we do all of the food prep and feeding and assistance with feeding and all of those types of things. We're going to do that in assisted living. We're also going to do activities So activities, you're required in most states by law to have multiple activities per day and you need to have an activities calendar. You need to be posting that. We do fun things at our facilities. Like we don't just do bingo. Like we do craft nights and like I saw
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some pictures recently of us do like our New Year's party, our Christmas party, Halloween party. Like we do like a Halloween carnival where the neighborhood can come. We do crafts like building things out of clay or drawing things. We have done like fantasy football. We've done football pick them type things. Like we do a ton of just fun things that are engaging at different levels and to different people cuz not everybody's going to want to do every single activity and that's fine.
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They have their own autonomy. They get to choose what they want to do. But that means that you need to come up with a bunch of different activities. We actually have a part-time activities director who plans these activities. Comes in multiple times per day. doesn't stay the whole time, but will come in and run those activities for the residents and keeps them happy and engaged and and it's super fun. Like, I love it. It's so much fun for me to see that as an owner. The other thing that
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we do in assisted living is we are community-based and we are comprehensive cuz we're there 24/7. We're building a community. We are providing everything that a resident needs. And that is a huge part of assisted living. So, it's really cool what we get to do in assisted living. I love it. Uh, I love the impact that we get to have with people and that we're always there for them to help them out. Okay, now let's talk about home health. Home health is inh home care. So, a resident doesn't
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need to leave their home. They get to stay in their home, which this is a huge thing for a lot of people because sometimes they don't want to leave. They just want to stay at home that they have all of their stuff there. They're comfortable there. Maybe they're getting closer to the end of life. Like my grandpa who is 85 years old, he does not want to go into an assisted living facility. Like he doesn't want to do it at all. And for him mentally, I don't think it would work very well. I think
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he would struggle with it. He loves being at home, being able to go putter around, tinker in his garage, and and do things. And he's getting to an age he has Parkinson's, and so it's hard for him to get around, but he's going to try. Dang it. He's going to do everything he can. And so they bring in home health to help out with things like their physical therapy, maybe some medication management, medication administration. So they're doing that and it's very personalized care to their
00:06:18 - 00:07:19
specific needs. What do you need? How much time do you need us to be here? Uh what can we do to help you out with it? It's very personalized, very individual to the person, which is great, but they are scheduled visits. This is not somebody that's there 24/7. You could do 24/7 care with home health, but it gets super super expensive to do that. And so from a financial standpoint, it's it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. Okay? So, they're scheduled visits. They're not 24/7 there. Um it
00:06:48 - 00:07:35
lacks some of that social engagement because you do get to see this person. You get to see this nurse who's coming in. You can build a relationship with that person, which is great, but you don't have other residents there. you don't you're not doing these regular activities that you would get inside of assisted living. Um, so that there are some trade-offs there. Now, not every single assisted living is going to do a ton of fun activities like our facilities do, but it's something that
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that you have to keep in mind. At least there's other residents, other people for you to talk to consistently, 24/7 coverage from the staff. Whereas in home care, home health care is not that way. It's very scheduled and regimented and you get to see that person on a regular basis, but you don't get to see them all the time, which hey, for some people that's totally fine. That's what they want to do. Um, it also one thing that I will say that is a great positive thing with home health is it's going to help
00:07:39 - 00:08:38
foster some independence. Now, for a guy like my grandpa who has Parkinson's, he wants the autonomy and it would cause him to regress. I I truly believe this to regress significantly from a mental standpoint if he had to be in a home and people were doing all the things for him because he wants to do these things. And so he gets to foster that independence by having somebody come in help him with the things that are just really hard for him to do for whatever reason. Make sure he has everything, you know, make the
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bed, whatever it is, doing some of those things. Uh because then he doesn't have to worry about doing those types of things and he can focus on the things that he wants. Like we he has a 3D printer. He loves it. It's like one of his favorite things to do. He'll just spend hours on that thing, building little trinkets and things for the grandkids and the great grandkids. And he loves it. It's It's super fun for him to do. Okay. So, what you can see there, there's just kind of this trade-off
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between what does a resident need, what do they want, and where are they going to have that m have those needs met. Now, let's talk about the cost difference because I think this is a common misconception because there's so many people that they think, "Oh man, assisted living is costing three, five, eight, $10,000 per month for this thing and that, oh man, how could anybody pay that much money for it?" Right? If that's you, you give me a like on the video because this is something that I
00:09:02 - 00:10:00
see from a lot of people. How can you do this? Some of my most popular videos are showing how much I can charge. Um, we'll link this up above. One is how I get $12,000 per room in my facility using Medicaid. Okay. One thing I do want to to share with you and make sure you know, it is not a single room. Okay? It's not. It's it's a shared room, but that's it's okay because we are following the rules. We're still making sure everybody's comfortable. It's there. I also have a video that is about
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$8,000 rooms. So, we'll link that up above as well. So, make sure you go watch those videos because they'll tell you a little bit more about some of those rates and how you can charge those rates and how you can justify those high rates. But the reason why you can charge those rates is in assisted living, you bundle the housing, the meals, the activities, it's all in one fee. Even for those that are on Medicaid, the way that that daily rate works for Medicaid is it's for the care that is provided
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and then you collect a portion of the resident's social security income that is going to pay for the rent, utilities, and the food. In some states, what you're going to see is they don't do the social security thing. That money ends up going into a fund and then you get that on a daily rate. So, you don't collect it. And so, in some states, you're actually collecting from the state for rent, utilities, and food, and care. Just kind of depends on the state and and how they work that out. Type in
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your state down below. I love doing this to see where you're at and what you need help with. It's on my list of things to do is to build videos for specific states, but man, I have so many other questions and comments and things that I'm trying to get to. So, uh, comment your state down below. Uh, and if you need some help figuring out the Medicaid process. All right, the next thing is home health. So, let's talk about the cost difference with home health. Home care is focused on care. It's not
00:10:48 - 00:11:43
necessarily things like meal prep or for the activities. It is strictly based off of the care. You typically are going to see that it's build at an hourly rate or sometimes even a quarter of an hourly rate. And so the way this works from a billing perspective is as a home health person, we send our caregiver in, we send our nurse in, they take care of this person for 90 minutes. We're going to take that and we're going to bill the code for that home health service to could be Medicare because Medicare will
00:11:16 - 00:12:14
cover home health in in many instances like Medicare Advantage will or it could be Medicaid whatever it's going to look like or it could be private pay but you're going to say hour and a half a time we're going to charge you one and a half units of $100 or an hour whatever the the unit is. I'm just using that as a quick example to to give you round numbers. Uh but that's how that's going to work. Okay. Now, assisted living does have that sticker shock, that 5, 8, 10, $15,000
00:11:45 - 00:12:42
amount upfront. It's a monthly number, right? That's that's a huge number. And I could pay home health to come in and and take care of me for an hour for $100 an hour. Why would I not choose that, right? And so, what you have to realize is home health can add up very, very quickly. So, if you needed that 247 coverage and but you wanted to be at home, so you're going to have a home health person come in and help you out with it. You need 247 coverage. It can get extremely expensive. Uh it can add
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up very quickly. Let's use a quick example of this. Let's say it's $100 an hour is what you're going to be charging for the service, right? If it's $100 an hour and you have somebody in your home for 24 hours, that's $2,400 for that one day, right? If I did that math right. Yeah. So, $2,400 for one day at $100 an hour. I I I think $100 an hour is is high, but it illustrates the point. So, if I'm doing that for 30 days, that's $60,000 in a month. It's ridiculous,
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right? Even if we we reduce that and it's $50 an hour, that reduces it to $30,000 a month. That's ridiculous. and and you get sticker shock by looking at a number for assisted living that's five, eight, 10, $15,000 where a kind of a low amount with home health. If if you're in there for 247 coverage, it's astronomical. Now, not everybody's going to need that level of care. In most cases, you don't. But if you ever needed that and you needed somebody in your home 247, it gets extremely expensive.
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So, this is where assisted living can really help out, okay? it can really adjust that, make it much more livable, and then you have 247 coverage. You've got people there, they're doing meals, they're doing activities, all of those things, and it can really benefit a resident. This is why assisted living makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Okay. Now, which of these is best? This is a great question. I had a comment on a YouTube video recently that was basically saying, "Why would anybody
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do assisted living when you could do home health?" And I'm hoping I'm breaking that barrier down a little bit for you to help you understand. But I also want to acknowledge that I think that the one that is best is based off of the resident. What does the resident need? What type of care do they need? What type of interactions do they need? What is going to be best for them? And that's what we want to do in our facilities as well. We want to identify what is the thing that the resident
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needs and we want to provide that care and that level of service to that resident. That's what we should be striving for. So in assisted living, it's much more community focused. It gives you that constant supervision. So if you if a resident needs that community, that group of people to come in and do activities with and they want to play cards or whatever it is that they want to do, have movie nights, you know, have pizza night, whatever, whatever it is, if they want those things, assisted living is a great
00:14:36 - 00:15:28
option for them. You get that, you get the coverage, the 24/7 coverage. That's a great option for people. Now, if you're somebody like my grandpa and you value your independence, right, and you only need help with a specific set of needs and he's not to a point, while he does have Parkinson's and he's been struggling with it, it's getting worse. Um, it it's something that he still values his independence very, very highly, and it's something that he wants. And so, for him, home health
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makes a ton of sense. So, we wouldn't put him in assisted living because that's not what he actually needs. um it's not what is going to be best for him in the long term. So, if you are one of those people that you're just watching this cuz you're like, I need to figure out the difference between assisted living and home health because myself or my loved one needs this service, type in long-term down below. I hope this video has been helpful for you. Make sure you like the video. If
00:15:25 - 00:16:12
you are an investor and you're trying to figure out which of these businesses is going to be right for you and you're trying to figure out which one is going to be best, type in which of those is is best for you. Type in AL for assisted living or HH for home health down below. I would love to see you know which of these is going to win. Which of of those is the type of business that you think you're best suited for in being successful. The other thing I want to really quickly point out is I have
00:15:49 - 00:16:34
people in my courses and my programs. Uh and if you want to find out which of my programs is best for you, go to aliquiz.com, look at the QR code over here in the corner. Now, what I have experienced is I have several people in my programs who join me and need some assistance and they have started out in home health and they want to get into assisted living because they can see that, hey, I'm in home health, but eventually I'm going to have residents that they need more coverage and it just
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doesn't make sense for me to provide 24/7 coverage from a home health perspective and so I can move them into my assisted living facility. I think you can do these things in tandem. I think you can be very successful when you have home health as this business and it's a lead source to fill the beds in your assisted living facility. I think it's an incredible option. So, that's something else that you might be wanting to consider as you get into this. So, I hope you found this video helpful. We
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talked a lot about this today about assisted living, what it is, how it works, home health, what it is and how it works, the cost difference, why it's different for people, and then what is the best option? And really, that is going to depend on the resident. If you found this video to be helpful, make sure you like the video, subscribe, and ring the bell as well, so you get notified every time we put out content like this to help people like you launch their assisted living business. And now,
00:17:00 - 00:17:49
I told you at the start of the video, I was going to tell you a little bit about my roadmap challenge. I would love to have you in there. Go to roadmapchallenge.com. This is a live coaching experience. It's a big It's just me in a virtual room with you answering your questions, helping you get the guidance that you need, helping you build your personal roadmap so you know how to get started and you can move forward with clarity and with confidence to know that, hey, the numbers actually work here. I'm
00:17:24 - 00:18:12
excited about this and I know why I'm excited about doing this. We talk about funding barriers. We talk about licensing barriers. helping you kind of get around those things so you know what to do when you are faced with big questions and you're trying to figure out how to get started on your assisted living journey. Again, I would love to see you in there. roadmapchallenge.com. It's one of my favorite things to do to teach those to answer questions for people in the Q&A, the VIP sessions and
00:17:48 - 00:18:42
help you out. Would love to do that for you. Uh please come check it out. Join me on my next one roadmapchallenge.com. I also want to remind you if hey if you're like I need some help from this guy but I don't know which of his programs is the best fit for me. I have a few different programs. Go to my quiz at aliquiz.com. It will take you 30 seconds to to fill out that quiz and it will give you an output. It'll tell you, hey, this is the program that I think is best fit for you. So aliquiz.com.
00:18:15 - 00:18:58
You can scan the QR code down here in the bottom bottom corner of the screen as well to help you out as you're trying to just figure out what is going to work best for you. Are you curious about assisted living, but you're not sure how to get started? At assisted livinginvesting.net, I'm here to help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. I would love to help you. I love coaching.
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It is one of my favorite things to do and I would love to do that for you. So, go check us out, assisted livinginvesting.net. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you are consistent and persistent, you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
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