Home health and personal care aides in New York earn a statewide mean of about $18 to $19 an hour, per federal wage data for May 2023, against a national median of $33,530 a year for the occupation as a whole, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2023 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. New York pays above that national line — and still sits at the bottom of the clinical pay ladder.
Health Work NY publishes information, not career advice. Every figure below carries its source and year in the sentence, and the sources are not neutral parties: a union's wage count is a union's count, an employer survey is an employer survey, and federal statistics measure a different thing than either. Readers weighing the work should treat each number as what its issuer measured.
How much do home health aides make in New York?
Federal and state sources converge on a range rather than a single figure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2023 OEWS data put the national median for home health and personal care aides at $33,530 a year, and its metropolitan breakdowns show New York City area wages above the national median, with mean hourly earnings in the high teens. The state's own wage floor works differently: home care aides in New York are covered by the state minimum wage — $16.50 an hour in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester as of January 2025, per the state Department of Labor — plus the Home Care Wage Parity provisions that add supplementary pay on top of the minimum for home care workers in downstate regions, per the same agency.
What do the regional differences look like?
New York's wage map is effectively a downstate-upstate split. The downstate minimum-wage regions — New York City, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester — set a $16.50 hourly floor as of January 2025, per the state Department of Labor, and wage-parity rules push total home care compensation higher still in those zones. Upstate regions carried a $15.50 minimum at the same date, with the remainder of the state at the federal-adjacent lower tier. Agency-level pay above the floor varies by employer; the bureau's metro tables, the state's wage orders, and agency job postings each measure a different slice of the market, and none of them substitutes for a specific employer's offer.
| Source | What it measures | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| BLS OEWS, May 2023 | National median, home health and personal care aides | $33,530/year |
| NYS Department of Labor, January 2025 | Minimum wage, NYC/LI/Westchester | $16.50/hour |
| NYS Department of Labor, January 2025 | Minimum wage, upstate large counties | $15.50/hour |
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How does aide pay compare with other direct-care jobs?
The gap is the story. Nursing assistants in hospitals and nursing homes earned a national median of $38,130 a year in May 2023, per BLS — about $4,600 above the aide median — and licensed practical nurses earned $59,730, a step change of more than $26,000. The comparison explains a persistent pattern that home care associations and unions alike describe: aides treating home care as an entry point and leaving for facility-based roles or nursing school. Neither the associations nor this publication treats that as a forecast; it is a documented wage differential, and differentials move people.
Why do surveys disagree with each other?
Because they count different workers. The federal occupational wage series covers wage-and-salary workers reported by employers and pools home health aides with personal care aides — two roles with different settings and often different payers. Union wage surveys, such as those published by 1199SEIU and its home care divisions, describe members under specific union contracts, which are typically above open-market rates. State labor department wage orders describe legal floors, not averages. A single honest sentence can hold all three — the figure a reader gets depends on which question was asked, and the source named in the sentence is the only way to know.
Home care is one of New York's largest and fastest-growing occupations — and, per the federal wage tables, one of the lowest-paid jobs in the clinical workforce.
What is driving change in aide pay?
Two forces are measurable as of early 2026. The first is the state minimum wage schedule itself, which the legislature indexed to inflation beginning in 2027 for the downstate regions, per the 2023 state budget legislation — meaning the $16.50 floor is scheduled to move automatically. The second is the chronic shortage the state has documented in its own home care workforce reports, which has pushed Medicaid rate adjustments aimed at home care wages; the state Department of Health attributed specific rate increases to workforce retention in its 2022 and 2023 Medicaid bulletins. Both forces raise the floor; neither determines what any individual agency actually pays, which remains an employer-by-employer question best answered by the employer's own posted rate.