Home Health Aide job description

About 4.7 million people worked as home health or personal care aides in 2025, and BLS expects roughly 760,500 openings a year through 2035, a number that counts aides leaving the occupation as well as the 18 percent growth. Home health aides are the part of that count who handle health-related work, changing bandages, dressing wounds, and giving medication, under the direction of licensed nursing staff who are offsite or on site only intermittently; personal care aides, 31-1122, do the daily-living work without the clinical piece. Both share one BLS wage line, 31-1120, so caregiver pay and home health aide pay come off the same row: a median of $35,800 in May 2025, running from $27,040 at the bottom decile to $45,040 at the top, below licensed nursing in the same buildings and homes.

Core Duties and Responsibilities

Aides keep records of a client's care, condition, and progress, and talk through what they notice with a supervisor or case manager. They help people in and out of beds, baths, wheelchairs, and cars, bathe and dress and groom them, check pulse, temperature, and respiration, cook to a prescribed diet, change linens, and give prescribed oral medication under a physician's written direction or a home care nurse's instruction. They also read aloud, hold conversations, run errands, and travel with clients to appointments and to work. Fifty-one percent of aides are in individual and family services and 23 percent in home healthcare services, and hospice is part of the territory.

Common Skills and Technologies

Active listening and service orientation carry the highest ratings O*NET gives the occupation, with social perceptiveness behind them, which is what a job done alone in someone else's house asks for. The software list is generic office and database packages. The equipment that matters is the bed, the bath, the wheelchair, the car, and the care record, and proper lifting technique is a safety requirement from the first shift, because moving a person in and out of bed is the physical center of the work.

Education, Training, and Career Path

Sixty-three percent of respondents named a high school diploma as the credential a new aide needs, and 21 percent a postsecondary certificate; some positions do not require even the diploma. O*NET Job Zone Two, some preparation needed, allows for months of learning next to experienced staff. The regulated corner is real, though. Aides employed by certified home health or hospice agencies that take Medicare funding have to complete formal training and pass a standardized test. Some aides stay with one client for years, and others rotate through group homes and assisted living.

Sources: O*NET 30.0, 31-1121.00 Home Health Aides, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/31-1121.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 31-1120, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes311120.htm.