Comparisons
Home care or assisted living: where the money actually crosses over
Both options are honest about what they cost. The decision usually turns on hours per day, not preference.
The short version
- Below about 4 hours a day, home care is almost always cheaper.
- Above about 6 hours a day, assisted living usually costs less for more supervision.
- Overnight care is the single biggest cost driver and the usual tipping point.
- 91% of Canadian seniors say they want to stay at home — the cost comparison is not the only input.
Run the arithmetic honestly
Assisted living in the GTA starts around $3,900 a month for a studio with standard care, before care-level add-ons. Call it $4,200–$4,800 in practice.
Home care at $33 an hour costs $3,960 a month at four hours a day, $5,940 at six hours, and $7,920 at eight. Add a single overnight shift a week and you are adding $1,200 a month.
So: under four hours a day, stay home. Over six, the residence is usually cheaper and comes with staff awake at 3am, which private hours at that price do not.
What the arithmetic leaves out
Home is not just cheaper hours, it is the dog, the garden, the neighbour who calls in, and a bedroom someone has slept in for forty years. Those are not sentimental extras; for someone with dementia, familiar environment is clinically load-bearing.
Against that: a house with stairs and a bathroom upstairs may be the thing causing the falls, and loneliness between visits is a real harm that a dining room solves.
The add-on trap
Most assisted living quotes a base rate plus care-level add-ons of $250–$900 a month, reassessed periodically. The base rate is what gets advertised; the reassessment is what changes your budget.
Ask for the add-on bands in writing, ask how much notice you get before a level change, and ask what the last three years of annual increases were. A residence that answers all three plainly is telling you something useful about how it operates.
Want the numbers for your own situation?
The cost calculator uses the published rate cards on this site, not national averages.