How Many Weekly Care Hours Are “Normal” As a Home Care Agency Grows?

Predictable growth matters in a home care business. Weekly care hours are the most practical, universal metric to understand performance, capacity and revenue. While every market is different, consistent patterns show up across agencies. Based on industry experience and the data points you shared, here is a realistic, operator-friendly view of what “normal” looks like for weekly care hours as an agency scales, plus the levers that move you faster.

What counts as “normal”

Weekly care hours vary by market, payer mix, service lines and staffing. Even so, most agencies follow a stair-step trajectory tied to intake discipline and caregiver supply.

Launch to 3 months: 50 to 150 hours per week

At this stage, your referrals are primarily personal network, a few paid leads and early professional relationships. Caregiver onboarding pace determines how fast you can activate cases. The core work is building a repeatable intake process, tightening speed to first contact and standardizing your follow up. This is also when many agencies find their pricing narrative and initial niche.

(For more on building referral relationships, check out our playbook).

4 to 6 months: 150 to 300 hours per week

Operators who establish reliable intake routines can compound small wins. Your website, Google Business Profile (head to our blog on local search engine optimization to learn more here) and early partners begin to generate consistent leads. Intake response times and persistent follow up sequences translate directly to hours booked. It is realistic to see 200 to 300 hours per week by month six in a reasonably sized market, assuming caregiver availability keeps pace.

6 to 12 months: 250 to 900 hours per week

The spread here reflects execution. Your benchmarks are credible at both ends: 250 hours per week around month ten is common for agencies still building referral breadth and caregiver bench strength, while 900 hours in ten months is achievable for disciplined operators in dense markets with strong compliance workflows and proactive intake. Success at this stage correlates with how quickly you turn inquiries into scheduled assessments, and assessments into care plans that launch within days, not weeks.

12 to 18 months: 600 to 1,000 hours per week

Many agencies cross 600 hours per week by month twelve and approach 900 hours per week by month eighteen. These thresholds usually come from operational maturity: consistent daily outreach, automated follow ups, measurable conversion steps, and a clean handoff from intake to scheduling. If your cancel rates are low and client length of stay is rising, weekly hours stabilize and start to climb predictably.

24 months: 1,200 to 1,500 hours per week (with upside beyond)

Hitting 1,500 hours per week at two years is a good benchmark for execution-focused teams. Agencies plugging intake leaks and expanding caregiver supply often exceed this mark. The variance at this tier depends on referral partnerships, brand presence and caregiver retention. If your mix includes higher-hour cases or live-in, you can reach the same weekly hours with fewer active clients, easing scheduling complexity.

How to translate hours into drivers you control

Weekly care hours are the product of three controllable inputs: demand, conversion and capacity. Turn them into simple, operator math.

• Demand: Inquiries per week

• Conversion: Inquiry to assessment rate, assessment to start-of-care rate

• Capacity: Caregiver hours available and scheduling efficiency

If you average 20 care hours per client per week, then 500 weekly hours likely means about 25 active clients. If your intake converts 25 percent of inquiries to starts within two weeks, then you need roughly 100 qualified inquiries across that period to add 25 clients. Where operators get stuck is not in the math, but in the mechanics of timely contact, thorough qualification and consistent follow up.

Read more about the importance of KPIs for monitoring your home care operations here.

Five levers that accelerate weekly hours

• Speed to first contact: Call or text within minutes, not hours. Fast responses win cases and build trust when families are under stress. (In fact, we've found that only around 30% of home care agencies pick up the phone, which is lost revenue).

• Automated follow ups: Prewritten sequences across phone, SMS and email ensure every inquiry gets multiple touchpoints. Persistence drives conversions.

• Assessment scheduling discipline: Book the in-home assessment during the first call whenever possible. Shrink time-to-assessment and time-to-start-of-care.

• Caregiver pipeline: Recruit continuously. Target surplus capacity relative to demand. The best intake team cannot overcome caregiver shortages.

• Quality loops: Improve the first 30 days of service. High-quality early experiences extend length of stay, stabilizing weekly hours.

Where AI technology in home care changes the slope

Sage is home care software designed to remove intake friction. Intake friction is what slows weekly hours. When operators adopt AI technology in home care that automates communication, documentation and follow up, two things happen. First, conversion rates rise because more inquiries are handled quickly and thoroughly. Second, capacity improves because staff spend less time on busywork and more time on high-value conversations.

Sage handles the busywork of client intake so your team can focus on care and connection.

• Automating call recording, transcription and summarization so you never have to take notes on a call again. Accurate, structured call data means fewer missed details and faster assessments.

• Generating instant follow ups so you have personalized drafts ready to send before you hang up. Consistent, professional communication boosts trust and moves families forward.

• Populating draft care plans based on call data, creating alignment between intake and scheduling. This reduces back-and-forth and shortens time-to-start-of-care.

• Syncing directly with your existing agency management system so everything stays in one operational flow. No duplicate data entry and no manual copy-paste.

Conclusion

Weekly care hours are a lagging metric that reflect the health of your home care marketing, intake discipline and caregiver capacity. The agencies that grow faster do not work harder on paperwork. They remove friction. That is the promise of AI technology in home care when it is purpose-built for this industry.

If you are ready to turn predictable intake into predictable weekly hours with home care software that actually fits your workflow, schedule a demo today to learn more about how Sage can help you grow your business