The franchise system gives you brand, training and a playbook. It does not give you a way to put health benefits in front of caregivers at $16 to $22 an hour. That is the gap this fills.
You run the same business with the same constraint, which means the math is the same everywhere.
A 40-caregiver location, mostly part-time, on a 7 to 10 percent net margin. Traditional group health prices out around $134,000 a year. A $2 an hour raise across the roster costs $134,360. Either one is the entire margin.
So the benefits conversation ends at the quote, the recruiting page stays generic, and turnover keeps running near the industry median of 75.5 percent.
Turnover does not appear on a P&L, which is exactly why it never gets costed. It shows up as advertising, as overtime covering the gap, as your scheduler's afternoon, and as a client who met four caregivers in six weeks and started calling around.
Approximate cost to replace one caregiver, built from the Center for American Progress finding that replacing a sub-$30,000 employee costs about 16 percent of annual salary, applied to the BLS median wage of $16.78 an hour.
Median caregiver turnover in 2025, flat for a second year, per Activated Insights benchmarking reported by HHAeXchange.
What that works out to annually at a 40-caregiver location. Within about $9,000 of the raise you already decided you could not afford.
These are constructions from public sources, clearly labeled, not a published home care figure. There is no current sourceable replacement-cost number for this industry, so we built one transparently instead of borrowing one of the unattributed figures floating around.
Fair question, and the comparison above invites it. Two things make the raise a worse deal than it looks.
A raise goes to all 40 caregivers, including the roughly 10 who were never going to leave. And it does not eliminate departures, it reduces them at the margin. So the $125,640 turnover figure is a floor for what the status quo costs, not a budget the raise would recover.
The Section 125 route is different because it does not compete for the same dollars. It redirects employer payroll tax that is already leaving your account. Here is how the payroll tax redirect actually works, start to finish.
"Most of my caregivers are part-time. They would not qualify."
Every group health quote you have seen was built around a 30-hour eligibility threshold, so this is a reasonable thing to assume. It is a carrier rule, not tax law.
A Section 125 election is open to W-2 employees regardless of hours worked. What varies with hours is how much each person gains, not whether they can participate. In home care that distinction matters more than almost anywhere else.
Detail on that is in the caregiver benefits breakdown, which prices seven common benefits per caregiver per year.
Headcount, average hours, pay range. Enough to tell you quickly whether this is worth pursuing at your location.
Free, usually back in a day or two, showing who qualifies and who does not.
CBIZ compliance opinion and HitesmanLaw legal assurance, both before you sign anything.
Caregiver communication, enrollment meetings and questions. Roughly 95 percent of the work is theirs.
Headcount, average hours, average wage. The estimator shows what you already pay in employer payroll tax and what turnover is costing you.
Open the estimatorHome Care Wellness provides marketing and enrollment support and does not provide legal, tax, accounting or health advice. The Unify Wellness Plan is administered by UnifyWell and ACA Solutions. Savings figures in any proposal are estimates based on the payroll information provided and are not guaranteed. Federal and state tax laws change. Consult your own CPA or attorney before enrolling.