What Percentage of Home Care Agencies Are Franchises?

If you are weighing home care as a business to own, the short answer to what percentage of home care agencies are franchises is roughly half, at least among the established, professionally run agencies that benchmark themselves against the market. Franchises and independents split that field almost down the middle.

There is a wrinkle in that number worth understanding, though, because it changes how you should read the opportunity in front of you. Here is where the figure comes from, why it is not quite the whole story, and what a near even split tells you if you are deciding how to enter the field.

Where The Figure Number Comes From

There is no perfect, government-issued census of who owns America’s home care agencies, so the most reliable read comes from the largest annual study of the sector: the 2026 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report, which drew responses from more than 750 home care provider organizations.

When those businesses were sorted by ownership type, the field split almost evenly. Roughly 48% described themselves as independently owned and operated franchises, another 2% as corporate-owned franchises, and about 45% as fully independent businesses with no franchise affiliation. Add the two franchise categories together and you land right around 50%. The rest is spread across social service organizations, hospital systems, and senior living communities.

The franchise share climbs even higher when you narrow to businesses built purely around home care rather than running it as one line among several. In that home-care-only group, more than half of the operators were franchises. Put simply, the more a business is built specifically to deliver in-home care, the more likely it is to be part of a franchise system.

What That Mix Signals If You Are Weighing the Opportunity

For someone deciding between building an independent agency from scratch and buying into a franchise system, that near even split is itself a useful signal. When something close to half of the most established operators in a growing industry have chosen the franchise route, it tells you the model has been tested at real scale in this specific market, not just in theory.

The pull behind that trend is not hard to see. The non-medical home care market sat at roughly $9.5 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach an estimated $18.7 billion by 2033, growing at about 10% a year. The demand underneath that growth is structural: AARP’s 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey found that 75% of adults 50 and older want to stay in their current homes as they age.

When thousands of independent owner-operators and institutional investors keep converging on structured, systematized care delivery, that convergence is worth weighing carefully as you compare going it alone against joining a proven system. None of it guarantees a particular outcome for any single owner. What it does tell you is that franchising is a mainstream, credible way into this industry, not a fringe one.

The Model Behind the Momentum

Part of what makes home care approachable for first-time owners is that the core of it is non-medical. Private duty care centers on companionship, help with daily activities, personal care, and the kind of steady human support that lets an aging adult stay safely at home. That means you do not need a clinical background to own a HomeWell franchise, which is a big reason entrepreneurs from outside healthcare are able to enter the field with confidence.

It also means the opportunity is inseparable from the need. When you open a HomeWell territory, you are not just claiming a slice of a growing market. You are standing up essential care your own community is genuinely short on, for families who need someone to show up. That combination, a real business built around a real local need, is what draws a lot of owners to homewellcares.com/franchise in the first place.

So the next time you see the question “what percentage of home care agencies are franchises,” you will know the real answer is not one tidy statistic. It is a story about an industry professionalizing in real time, with franchising sitting right at the center of where the most serious operators have already placed their bets.

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