How Much Does Long-Term Care Insurance Cost? Use This Calculator

Nobody plans to need long-term care. But the odds say many of us will. Research has found that roughly 7 in 10 people turning 65 will need some form of long-term care at some point in their lives.

And here's the part most people miss: you don't have to be sick to need it. Long-term care is help with daily living. Bathing, dressing, eating, moving around, using the bathroom. If you can't do those on your own, you need care, whether you have a diagnosis or not.

So the real question isn't whether you'll need care. It's how you'll pay for it when you do. That's where most families find themselves caught off guard.

What Long-Term Care Actually Costs in 2026

Long-term care is expensive. Not a little expensive. Retirement-altering expensive.

These are the national median monthly costs that ApplyForLife's planning tools use as starting points:

- In-home care runs about $6,483 per month for a home health aide

- Assisted living averages about $5,900 per month

- Nursing home care in a semi-private room costs about $9,277 per month

- Nursing home care in a private room costs about $10,646 per month

Those are national medians. The exact number in your state and city will be different, sometimes a lot different. But the point holds: we're talking five figures a month for full nursing care.

Now do the math on what that does to savings. A year of nursing home care in a private room, using that median, is over $127,000. That can erase decades of careful saving in a single year.

Why Care Costs Rise Faster Than Everything Else

Long-term care doesn't inflate like the rest of the economy. It inflates faster.

Care is labor intensive. It takes real people to bathe, feed, and watch over another person around the clock. You can't automate it or ship it overseas. When wages and staffing costs go up, the price of care goes up with them.

That's why planning for today's cost is a trap. The care you might need at 80 will not cost what it costs today. In the ApplyForLife planner you can set an inflation assumption, usually 3% to 5% a year on care costs, and watch the future monthly number climb.

That inflation is one of the main reasons people who skip planning end up short. They size their plan against today's prices, not the prices they'll actually face.

Medicare Won't Cover This

This is the biggest misunderstanding in all of retirement planning, so let's be direct about it.

Medicare does not pay for long-term custodial care. It covers some skilled nursing care after a hospital stay, but only for a short time and only when you're improving. The day-to-day help people live with for years, that's custodial care, and Medicare won't touch it.

Medicaid does cover long-term care, but it's a needs-based program. You have to spend down your assets to qualify. That means draining your savings, and in many cases your house, before the government steps in. Some people plan that way deliberately, but most don't want to spend their retirement into poverty to get care.

That's the gap long-term care insurance is designed to fill: the space between what you can comfortably pay and what full-time care actually costs.

The Price of Waiting

Long-term care insurance is priced on your health and your age. Both move in one direction as you get older, and neither one helps you.

The premiums rise steeply with age. Buying in your 50s can lock in rates a fraction of what the same policy costs in your 70s, if you can even get approved at that age. And as you age, health issues creep in. A policy you could have bought at 55 might be unaffordable or unavailable at 65.

That's the real cost of waiting: not just higher premiums, but losing the option entirely. Long-term care is one of the few insurance products where earlier is genuinely cheaper, because you're buying against a risk that's still far off and your health is still clean.

How to Find Your Real Number

You don't need a vague fear of long-term care costs. You need a real number for your situation.

Start with the care type you'd most likely need. In-home care if you want to age in place. Assisted living if you want community support. Nursing care for the most intensive needs.

Decide how many years you want to fund. The tool walks you from two years up to five, with three as a sensible starting point. Then layer in whatever coverage or savings you already have to offset the cost.

Here's what most people find: the gap between what they've set aside and what a real year of care costs is far larger than they assumed. It's uncomfortable, but it's the discomfort that motivates a plan.

The Bottom Line

Long-term care is one of the biggest financial risks in retirement, and it's the one most people plan for last, or not at all. The costs are real, they rise faster than inflation, and Medicare won't cover the day-to-day care you might need for years.

The good news is you don't have to guess. You can run your own numbers today, for free, and see the actual gap in dollars.

See your own long-term care gap with the ApplyForLife Insurance Needs Planner. It takes a few minutes and gives you a number you can actually plan around, instead of a guess.