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Guides › Long-Term Care Planning
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: whether you can skip long-term care insurance is a number, not a feeling: the pot you would need to ring-fence today to cover your own care, versus what the premiums would grow to if you invested them instead. At the 2025 median cost of assisted living ($6,200/month) and 4% care inflation, a 55-year-old planning for three years of care at 82 is pricing a bill that has nearly tripled by the time it arrives. This calculator computes both paths on your numbers.
What care actually costs (2025 survey medians)
- $129,575/year ($355/day) — nursing home, private room; semi-private $114,975.
- $74,400/year ($6,200/month) — assisted living.
- $80,080/year — in-home care at the $35/hour median, 44 hours/week.
Source: CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey (about 16,000 completed provider surveys collected July–November 2025, published by Genworth). These are national medians — metro areas run materially higher — and they are the defaults in the calculator below, editable to your area.
Figures verified against the CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey and the ACL long-term care statistics page on September 30, 2026; the 2026 premium benchmarks, the $165,000 benefit pool and the age-at-claim default were not re-checked.
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The comparison above is deliberately fair to self-insuring: it credits you the full investment growth on every premium dollar you did not pay. Even so, two things tilt real decisions. First, the average stay is not the risk you are insuring. A two-to-three-year stay is survivable arithmetic for most people with meaningful assets; the five-plus-year dementia tail is what destroys estates, and that tail is exactly where a benefit pool with an inflation rider earns its premiums many times over. Second, self-insuring only works if the pot actually exists. A number on this screen is not a ring-fenced account; money earmarked casually tends to be spent, gifted, or riding the market at the moment it is needed.
The middle path is sizing: insure the tail, self-fund the front. A policy with a long elimination period and a growing pool costs far less than first-dollar coverage, and your ring-fence only has to carry you to the policy.
Related decisions: what coverage costs at each age · who can genuinely self-insure · buying at 55 vs 65 · hybrid vs traditional policies · the self-funder’s playbook.
If you are supporting a parent: two separate tests decide whether you can claim them, and failing the income one still leaves you the deduction for their medical and care costs — which at care prices is usually the larger of the two.
Before you use the 70% statistic: the same government page says a third of 65-year-olds will never need long-term care, 59% of those who do receive unpaid care only, and just 35% ever use a nursing facility. Long-term care statistics, quoted from the source.
Before comparing the two routes — whether it is worth it for you at all.
A life policy’s care rider is a third option again, and the tax section it sits under changes what it pays — 7702B versus 101(g).