Care in old age - Value of your home

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Care in old age - Value of your home

The value of your home is included, as part of your capital unless your stay in the care home is only temporary or one of the following people will still be living in the home:

• Your husband or wife or a partner who lives with you as husband or wife.
• A relative who is aged 60 or more or is incapacitated.
• A relative under the age of 16 for whom you are legally responsible.
  

The local authority has discretion to ignore the value of your home in other circumstances: for example, if your carer lives with you and has nowhere else to go.

Where none of these exceptions applies, you might have to sell your home in order to pay the care home fees. If it takes a while to sell, the local authority might agree to pay the fees for you for now, but, to take a 'charge' over the home so that it can recoup the money once the property is sold.

You might be tempted to give away some of your capital or make some expensive purchases before being assessed, but if the social services department thinks you've done this deliberately to manipulate the rules, it can treat you as still owning the capital.