Effective 1 April 2026 · next review 1 April 2027
Every fee, every home, on this page. No form in the way.
Nine out of ten care home websites in Cheshire will not tell you what they charge until you have given them your telephone number. There is a reason for that and it is not a good one. Below is the whole price list, what is inside it, what a council placement actually pays, and the arithmetic of how long money lasts. It has been on this website since 2011.
The price list
What each home charges a week
One figure per line, fully inclusive. There is no assessment band, no “from” that turns into something else after the tour, and no separate charge for a higher level of need.
| Home | Type of care | Weekly fee | A year | Free today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ashcombe House Knutsford WA16 |
Residential | £1,340 | £69,680 | 2 rooms |
| Ashcombe House Garden Household |
Dementia | £1,510 | £78,520 | 1 room |
| Ashcombe House Knutsford WA16 |
Respite & short stay minimum one week |
£1,415 | — | By arrangement |
| Highfield Manor Alderley Edge SK9 |
Nursing & residential RN on site 24 hours |
£1,610 | £83,720 | Full · 7 waiting |
| The Wren Wilmslow SK9 |
Dementia households of nine |
£1,490 | £77,480 | 1 room |
| The Wren Wilmslow SK9 |
Dementia respite minimum one week |
£1,565 | — | Ask Rachel |
| Any home council-funded |
Cheshire East placement 11 residents currently |
Council rate | — | Case by case |
Individual rooms are priced individually. The figures above are the fee for that type of care at that home. Within a home, a larger room with a better outlook costs a little more — Room 14 at Ashcombe is £1,395 rather than £1,340 because it is four square metres bigger and faces the lawn. Every free room is listed with its own price here, and the price is attached to the room, not to your relative.
The annual review. Fees change once a year, on 1 April, capped at CPI plus two percentage points, with ninety days' written notice. April 2026 was 4.1 per cent. April 2025 was 3.4 per cent. In April 2021 we did not raise fees at all. That is the entire history and we will show you the letters.
The part that catches people out
What is inside the fee, and what most homes charge extra for
The published weekly fee is only half the story. The average care home invoice in this county carries between four and nine additional lines. Here is the same list, priced at what families tell us they are charged elsewhere.
| Item | At CareWhenNeeded | Typically charged elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| All personal and nursing care, day and night | Included | Included, but often re-banded upward as needs rise |
| All meals, snacks, drinks and a visitor’s lunch | Included | Included; guest meals £6–£12 |
| Laundry, including dry cleaning | Included | £8–£15 a week |
| Hairdressing | Included — Angela, Wednesdays | £14–£22 a visit |
| Chiropody / podiatry | Included — monthly | £30–£40 a visit |
| Physiotherapy where clinically indicated | Included — Kate, Mon & Fri | £45–£60 a session |
| Newspapers and magazines | Included | £3–£6 a week |
| Toiletries and continence products beyond NHS allocation | Included | £10–£20 a week |
| Outings and the minibus | Included | £5–£15 a trip |
| Escort to hospital appointments | Included — a carer they know | £18–£25 an hour |
| Room refurbishment before move-in | Included | Sometimes charged as a “set-up fee” of £250–£600 |
| Third-party top-up on a council placement | Never charged | £150–£400 a week |
| Fee increase because needs have increased | Never charged | The single commonest surprise |
| Deposit or admission fee | Never charged | £500–£1,500, sometimes non-refundable |
| Charging after death, while the room is cleared | Three days, then nothing | Commonly 2–4 weeks’ notice charged in full |
The right-hand column is not a smear. Those figures come from invoices that families arriving from other homes have shown us, and most of those homes are perfectly decent places doing a difficult job on tight margins. The point is only that a £1,250 headline with nine extras is not cheaper than £1,340 with none — it is roughly £70 a week dearer and considerably harder to plan for. When you compare us with anyone, compare the total.
Where £1,340 actually goes
We would rather show you the arithmetic than be asked for it
Care is a labour business. Roughly sixty-two pence in every pound we take goes out again as wages, and most of the rest is the building, the food and the regulator. Our operating margin across the group last year was 9.4 per cent, which is below the sector average of about eleven and well below the private equity-backed groups.
- 62% — staff. Carers start at £13.90 an hour here, £1.15 above the sector median for Cheshire, and we pay for training time and handover.
- 11% — the buildings. Ashcombe is Georgian and listed, which is lovely and ruinously expensive; the roof alone was £186,000 in 2023.
- 9% — food, and the kitchen team. £63 a resident a week against a sector average nearer £38. Tom buys meat from Frost’s in Chelford and the vegetables come out of the walled garden.
- 8% — utilities, insurance, CQC fees, laundry, medical supplies and everything else that keeps a house of 48 people running.
- 9.4% — what is left. Some of it pays for the eleven council-funded residents whose fee does not cover their cost. The rest goes back into the buildings.
You may reasonably not believe any of this. Our filed accounts are at Companies House under 07612884 and Eleanor will go through them with you line by line if you want, which two families have asked for and both were welcome.
Paying for it
Six ways families actually fund a care home, and who qualifies
Most people arrive believing they must sell the house immediately and that there is no help. Both are usually wrong. None of the below is advice about your particular circumstances — it is the map, and Eleanor will sit down and go through it with you for nothing.
Self-funding
Above £23,250 in capital, including the value of the house in most cases, you pay the full fee. Roughly seven in ten of our residents start here. The arithmetic worth doing is not “can we afford it” but “for how many years”, and we will do that with you on a single sheet of paper.
Local authority funding
Below £23,250 the council contributes and below £14,250 it pays in full apart from an income contribution. Cheshire East’s standard residential rate is materially below our fee. We take the difference on the chin. We do not ask your family for a top-up and we never have.
NHS Continuing Healthcare
If the primary need is a health need rather than a social one, the NHS pays the whole fee, regardless of savings. It is refused far more often than it should be and around half of appeals succeed. We complete the checklist for you, we attend the multidisciplinary meeting, and we have supported nine appeals in five years of which six were won.
Funded Nursing Care (FNC)
A flat NHS contribution towards the nursing element at Highfield, currently £250.65 a week, paid whatever your savings are. It comes off your invoice, not ours — some homes quietly keep it. We show it as a separate credit line so you can see it arrive.
Deferred payment agreement
The council secures the fees against the house so it need not be sold in a hurry, or at all while a spouse lives in it. It is badly publicised and hugely underused. If the house is the whole plan, ask about this before you ring an estate agent.
Attendance Allowance
£73.90 or £110.40 a week depending on whether night care is needed, not means-tested, and payable to self-funders in a care home. A surprising number of families never claim it. It is worth up to £5,740 a year and the form takes about an hour.
An hour with Eleanor costs nothing and carries no obligation. She has done this since 2011, she is not on commission, and she has told plenty of families that the right answer was care at home for another year. Ring 01565 741 200 and ask for the funding conversation, or book it here.
Free · 24 pages · no salesperson will ring
The Cheshire Care Home Fees Guide 2026
What Cheshire East actually pays, how the £23,250 capital threshold works in practice, when NHS Continuing Healthcare is worth fighting for, why deferred payment agreements are underused, and the eleven questions to ask any home that will not publish its fees.
Written by Eleanor Whitfield. Used by two Cheshire hospital discharge teams.
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The money questions, answered plainly
Straight answers about fees
Because a published fee can only be compared, and a fee given on the phone can be adjusted. If a home knows your relative is coming from a private house in Alderley Edge rather than from a council list, the number it says out loud is sometimes different. We think that is indefensible, and it is the reason this page has existed since 2011.
There is a second, more sympathetic reason: fees genuinely do vary by room and by need in most homes, so a single number feels dishonest to them. Our answer to that was to publish every room separately instead of hiding the lot.
Yes, within a type of care. If your mother arrives walking independently and three years later needs two carers, a hoist and full assistance with everything, the invoice is the same invoice. No re-banding, no reassessment charge, no letter.
The one exception is a move between services — residential to nursing, for example — because that is a different registration with a registered nurse on site around the clock. That means a move to Highfield Manor at £1,610, and we would tell you the number before anything at all happened.
This costs us money on the residents who live longest and it is deliberate. The alternative is a family being told, at the exact moment their mother has deteriorated, that it will now be £280 a week more.
Your relative stays. It is in the contract you sign on day one, in plain English, and we have never asked anyone to leave for money in fifteen years.
What happens in practice: at around £30,000 of remaining capital we sit down and do the local authority financial assessment together. Cheshire East then pays its standard rate, which is below our fee, and the group absorbs the difference — currently about £190 a week each for eleven residents, a little over £108,000 a year.
We are able to do that because the group is family-owned and takes a 9.4 per cent margin rather than the 20-plus that a leveraged operator needs. It is the single clearest argument for choosing an independent home.
No. Not now and not later. A third-party top-up is the arrangement where the council pays its rate and the family is asked to find the difference, often £150 to £400 a week, frequently for the rest of the resident’s life and rising annually.
It is legal, it is extremely common, and it puts an unpayable bill on the children of the poorest residents. We do not do it at any of the three homes.
No. No deposit, no admission fee, no set-up fee, no assessment fee, no refurbishment charge. The first money that changes hands is the first weekly invoice, in arrears, after your relative has actually moved in.
We also will not take money to hold a room. If Room 11 might be free in five weeks, we will not sell you a maybe — you go on a list with three names on it and we ring you when it is real.
Four weeks’ notice to leave, on either side, and we have used our side of it twice in fifteen years.
After a death, we charge three days while the room is cleared and then stop, and if the family needs longer than three days nobody will mention it. Notice periods of two to four weeks charged in full after a death are standard across the sector and it is the practice we find hardest to defend on the sector’s behalf.
Self-funded residential care across Cheshire East typically runs £1,250 to £1,700 a week, and nursing £1,500 to £2,100. So our residential fee sits in the lower third of the county and our nursing fee sits in the middle.
But compare totals rather than headlines. A £1,250 fee with laundry, hairdressing, chiropody, newspapers, outings and hospital escorts charged separately lands at roughly £1,410 in practice, and it lands unpredictably, in months when somebody happened to need a lot of chiropody.
Now you have the price. Come and see whether it is worth it.
Half past twelve on a weekday, stay for lunch, walk wherever you like. If the home is not worth the number on this page, you will know within twenty minutes and we would rather you found out now.