How we rate, and where every number comes from
Five criteria, three datasets, and the number this desk will not print.
What the ranking measures
The front page ranks St. Louis home care agencies for one kind of household: the family paying out of pocket, which needs to understand what it is about to spend before it signs. So the ranking is about cost transparency, not about care quality, which no public dataset measures and which this desk has no way to observe.
Every judgement comes from the agency's own public website, read in September 2026: its homepage, its FAQ, and any pricing, cost, how-it-works or paying-for-care page. We ask the same questions of every site. Does it publish a rate or a rate range? Does it state a minimum visit or say there is none? Is the first consultation or assessment described as free? Does it name the payer sources it takes and does not take? Will it talk about cost before you commit? When a site is silent, the silence is recorded as the finding, "does not publish rates", and never filled with a guess.
The five criteria
| Local ownership and accountability | Whether the person answering the phone is accountable for the plan and the invoice: an owner-operated local company, or a local office of a national brand, as each site describes itself. |
|---|---|
| The first conversation | Whether the site commits to discussing cost on the first call, and whether that first consultation or assessment is free and carries no obligation. |
| Starting commitment and plan flexibility | Whether a minimum visit, deposit or contract length is stated, and whether support can start small and change as the household's needs change. |
| Non-medical clarity | Whether the site says plainly what kind of help it provides and how it is paid for, so a family does not assume a program or insurer covers something it does not. |
| Family communication | Whether the family controls how it is contacted: optional phone fields, contact only by the method chosen, information available without a form. |
How the order is set
This site is supported by New Plan Care, a St. Louis in-home care company. It is not in the ranking and carries no score.
Positions 1 through 7 are set by our reading of how much each agency's own site tells a paying family about money, most first. They carry a qualitative label, not a score. Their Google rating and review count are printed verbatim from the dataset and are not used to sort them.
Who was eligible. Agencies in the Google Maps pull with 20 or more reviews and a working website. Excluded from every named list: listings under one brand this publisher does not list. Excluded from the "best agency" ranking: FreedomCare, a Medicaid consumer-directed program rather than an agency; it appears, labelled, only in the pure review-count tables.
What each ranked agency's website says about cost
Read September 12, 2026. "Not stated" means we did not find it on the pages listed above.
| Agency | Own rate published | Minimum visit | Free first visit | Payers named |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assistance Home Care | No; pricing page explains the mechanism | No service length commitment | Yes, discovery visit | Takes and excludes, both named |
| Caring Christians Private Duty | No; one price days, nights and weekends | None | Yes, consultation and assessment | Long-term care insurance |
| Seniors Home Care | No; based on level of care | Four hours | Yes, complimentary assessment | Long-term care insurance; not Medicare |
| Amada Senior Care | No; area-wide range only | Area-wide typical only | Yes, consultation | VA, long-term care insurance |
| Right at Home | No; hourly, rates from local office | Not stated | Not stated | Private pay, insurance, VA, others |
| HomeTeam | No; caregiver wage only | Not stated | Yes, consultation | Missouri Medicaid, VA |
| TheKey | Does not publish rates | Not stated | Yes, within 24 hours | Not stated |
Source 1. Google Maps home care listings, St. Louis metro
| What it is | 162 home care listings returned by Google Maps searches across the St. Louis metro, with name, city, address, phone, website, rating, review count, category and listing ID. |
|---|---|
| Collected with | Apify compass/crawler-google-places, stored as home_care_companies.json. |
| Pulled | September 12, 2026 |
| Used for | Every rating and review count on this site, reproduced verbatim. A rating is an average of the reviews, not something this desk checked. Counts move daily. |
| Removed | Two listings under a brand this publisher does not list and one listing with a New Jersey address, leaving 159 rows for the list pages. |
Pages built on it: the 25 most-reviewed listings, agencies rated 4.8 or higher with 30 or more reviews and St. Charles County listings by reviews. Each states its cut and sort in a methodology box.
Source 2. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024
| What it is | A survey of employers producing employment and wage estimates by occupation and area. |
|---|---|
| File used | oesm24ma.zip, sheet MSA_M2024_dl.xlsx, the metropolitan estimates file. |
| URL | bls.gov/oes/tables.htm |
| Rows taken | Area 41180, St. Louis, MO-IL, all detailed occupations in major group 31 plus adjacent care roles. Separately, occupation 31-1120 for all 391 metro areas with a published median, with PRIM_STATE used to file each metro under one state. |
| Columns used | TOT_EMP, H_MEDIAN, H_PCT10, H_PCT90, A_MEDIAN, and the all-occupations row 00-0000 for metro size. |
| Pulled | September 10, 2026 |
| Licence | United States federal government work, public domain. BLS asks to be cited as the source, which is what this page does. |
Pages built on it: care wages by occupation, care occupations by headcount, home care wages by metro, the 10th-to-90th percentile spread, the 8 metros filed under Missouri and the 19 Midwest metros with 5,000 or more aides, plus the $14.28 module on the front page.
Source 3. BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2024 fourth quarter
| What it is | A near census of jobs and wages built from state unemployment insurance filings, not a survey. |
|---|---|
| Endpoint used | https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/4/area/{FIPS}.csv, one file per county. |
| URL | bls.gov/cew |
| Rows taken | own_code 5, private ownership, industry 621610, home health care services, for the 15 counties of the St. Louis metro, fixed by the Census Bureau's July 2023 metropolitan delineation file before any wage was read. |
| Columns used | qtrly_estabs, month3_emplvl, avg_wkly_wage, disclosure_code. |
| Pulled | September 10, 2026 |
| Licence | United States federal government work, public domain. |
Page built on it: home care payroll by county. One further citation appears on what an hourly rate covers: IRS Tax Topic 751, for the employer share of Social Security and Medicare tax.
Table rules. Each ranked page states its metric, its universe and its sort direction on the page. The universe is fixed by a rule that does not involve the metric, so the selection cannot be tuned to produce a result. Suppressed values are printed as suppressed, never as zero.
The refusal: this site does not publish agency prices
There is no public dataset of what home care agencies charge per hour in the St. Louis metro. Not at BLS, not at the Census Bureau, not at any state agency. The widely quoted figures come from a commercial cost-of-care survey whose terms permit citation but not republication, and area-wide ranges on agency websites rarely name a source. This desk will not copy those numbers, average them, or multiply a wage by a factor to invent one. The only way to learn a rate is to ask agencies for a quote in writing.
Corrections and independence
If a figure here does not match its source file, or an agency's website has changed since we read it, that is ours to fix, and we will correct the page and note the date. This site is published by OwnersFirm. Home care as ranked here is non-medical in-home support, and nothing on this site is medical advice.