Caregiver job description
17 verified openings in Caregiver
Bathing, dressing, feeding, grooming, toileting, and helping someone walk across a room make up the center of this job, and it happens wherever the person needs it: their own home, a day program, their workplace, or the community. O*NET keeps two records here: personal care aides, 31-1122, built around activities of daily living and household support, and home health aides, 31-1121, built around health-related tasks under a nurse's or therapist's direction. BLS does not split them for pay. One line, 31-1120, covers home health and personal care aides together, so the median quoted here and on the home-health-aide page is the same figure: $35,800 a year in May 2025. The bottom tenth earned under $27,040 and the top tenth over $45,040, across about 4.3 million workers.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Two things carry equal weight here: hands-on personal care, hygiene help and assistance walking, and the record of it, with any change in the client's condition reported to a supervisor. Case reviews with the care team, coaching on hygiene, nutrition, or infant care, and companionship through illness or recovery come close behind. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, and errands belong to the role. So does monitoring vital signs and medication under the direction of a registered nurse or physiotherapist, which is where the two aide occupations overlap in practice.
Common Skills and Technologies
Service orientation and social perceptiveness matter more here than any technical skill: reading a client's mood counts for as much as any procedure. MEDITECH is the single hot technology on the record, the one records system that shows up in postings by name. The rest is ordinary office software: scheduling, email, video calls, and web-based training.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Nothing here requires a degree. O*NET's Job Zone 2 assumes a high school diploma plus a few months to a year alongside experienced aides. Just under half the aides surveyed, 48 percent, named a high school diploma or GED. Another 22 percent had an associate degree and 18 percent had not finished high school; the rest reported a post-secondary certificate or some college. Titles on the record include Personal Care Aide, Direct Care Worker, Resident Assistant, and Medication Aide.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 31-1122.00 Personal Care Aides, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/31-1122.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 31-1120, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes311120.htm.