Three sources, one refusal
Where every number on this site comes from, and the number this site will not print.
1. 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 four adjacent care roles. Separately, occupation 31-1120 for all 391 metro areas with a published median. |
| 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 and home care wages by metro.
2. 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. |
| Columns used | qtrly_estabs, month3_emplvl, avg_wkly_wage, disclosure_code. |
| Pulled | September 10, 2026, fetched live and checked row by row. |
| Licence | United States federal government work, public domain. |
Page built on it: home care payroll by county.
3. Census Bureau metropolitan delineation files, July 2023
| What it is | The official list of which counties belong to which metropolitan statistical area. |
|---|---|
| Used for | Fixing the 15 counties of area 41180 before any wage was looked at, so no county could be added or dropped to shape a table. |
| URL | census.gov delineation files |
| Pulled | September 10, 2026 |
| Licence | United States federal government work, public domain. |
One further citation appears on what an hourly rate covers: IRS Tax Topic 751, for the employer share of Social Security and Medicare tax, read September 10, 2026.
The refusal: this site does not publish agency prices
Say it plainly. There is no public dataset of what home care agencies charge per hour in the St. Louis metro, or anywhere else. Not at BLS. Not at the Census Bureau. Not at any state agency.
Figures do circulate. The widely quoted ones come from a commercial cost-of-care survey, a paid product whose terms permit citation of the publisher but not republication of its tables. This desk will not copy those numbers, will not average them, and will not paraphrase them into a chart. If you want them, buy them from the company that collected them.
We also refuse the shortcut of multiplying a wage by a factor to produce a price. Pick a multiplier and you can make a rate sheet say anything. That is a guess wearing a dollar sign, and this site is a rate sheet for measured numbers only.
So the honest answer to "what does home care cost per hour in St. Louis" is that no public source knows, and the only way to find out is to ask agencies for a quote in writing. What this desk can tell you is the wage floor underneath every one of those quotes, which is what the tables here are for.
How the rankings are built
Each ranked page states its metric, its universe and its sort direction in a box on the page. The universe is always fixed by a rule that does not involve the metric: every occupation in a classification family, every county in a delineated metro, the largest metros by total employment. That way the selection cannot be tuned to produce a result.
Suppressed values are printed as suppressed. They are never rendered as zero, never dropped quietly, and never averaged into a total.
Corrections and independence
If a figure here does not match the source file, it is our error and we will fix it and say so on the page. This site is published by OwnersFirm. New Plan Care is a client of OwnersFirm and pays for the featured placement that appears on this site. That placement sits outside every table, is labelled on every page it appears on, and touched none of the data above.