Home Health Aide and Home Care in New Jersey

Almost nobody searches for a home health aide in NJ out of curiosity. They are three days out from a parent’s discharge, or they have just worked out that Mom has not showered in a week, and they need to know what the job is called, who is allowed to do it and what it costs — today, not eventually.

In New Jersey the job title has a precise legal answer. The credential is the Certified Homemaker-Home Health Aide, written CHHA, issued by the New Jersey Board of Nursing inside the Division of Consumer Affairs. A CHHA works from a written care plan created by a registered nurse and carries out the tasks that nurse delegates. That single fact explains most of the paperwork you are about to see, and why a friend in another state was offered a “personal care aide” while every quote you get here says CHHA.

Day to day, a home health aide handles:

• Bathing, showering, dressing, grooming and oral care
• Toileting and incontinence care
• Safe transfers, walking, and getting in and out of bed or a chair
• Meal preparation, help with eating, and following a prescribed diet
• Medication reminders — reminders, not administration
• Light housekeeping, laundry, linens, groceries and errands
• Company, conversation, and a second set of eyes that notices when something changes

What a home health aide does not do: give injections, change a wound dressing, manage an IV or make a clinical judgment. Board of Nursing rules limit a CHHA to tasks a registered nurse has delegated. If a doctor has ordered skilled nursing or physical therapy, that is Medicare-certified home health — short visits a few times a week for a defined recovery period, and a different service entirely. We set the two side by side in home health care vs home care, and the role itself is covered in more depth on our home health aide services page.

New Jersey regulates home health aides more tightly than most states, which is good news on the day you hand a stranger a key to your mother’s house. To be certified, an aide must:

• Complete 76 hours of approved training. A Board of Nursing-approved homemaker-home health aide program runs at least 76 hours — 60 hours of classroom instruction and 16 hours of clinical instruction in a skills laboratory or patient-care setting (N.J.A.C. 13:37-14).
• Pass a competency evaluation. A written examination plus a hands-on skills demonstration.
• Clear a criminal history background check before the certification is issued.
• Be at least 18 and hold a government-issued photo ID.
• Renew every two years. New Jersey certifications expire on a two-year cycle and lapse without a renewal application.
• Appear in the public register. Every active aide is listed in the state’s online license verification directory under the profession “Homemaker - HHA.”

There are two shorter routes to the same certification: a nursing student who has completed a Fundamentals of Nursing course can apply without the 76-hour program, and a certified nurse aide can take a bridge course instead. The credential at the end is identical.

Two things follow for families. First, New Jersey does not sell a cheaper, lesser-trained tier of hands-on care: a registered health care service firm may only place actively certified home health aides. Second, you can check the claim rather than trust it. Ask any agency for the name of the aide it intends to send and look the certification up yourself before the first shift.

New Jersey splits oversight of home care between two different state agencies, and families lose real weeks to the confusion.

Non-medical home care — everything described above — is provided by Health Care Service Firms, which register with the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs under N.J.S.A. 34:8-45.1 and N.J.A.C. 13:45B rather than holding a Department of Health license. That registration renews annually, requires a $10,000 surety bond (N.J.A.C. 13:45B-13.3), and — unusually among states — requires the firm to obtain accreditation from a state-recognized accrediting body within 12 months of registering. Firms also file financial statements with the Division each year, with audits required above set thresholds.

Skilled home health — the doctor-ordered nursing and therapy Medicare pays for — is licensed separately by the New Jersey Department of Health under N.J.A.C. 8:42 and gated by a Certificate of Need, which is why new licenses of that kind are rare.

If you are comparing home care agencies in New Jersey, four questions separate the serious ones quickly, and every one of them has a checkable answer:

1. Are you registered as a Health Care Service Firm, and who accredits you?
2. Are your caregivers your W-2 employees, or independent contractors I would be employing?
3. Is every aide an active CHHA, and will you give me names so I can verify them with the state?
4. Who writes and supervises the care plan, and how often does a nurse actually come to the house?

An agency that answers all four without hesitating is telling you something real about how it operates. Our longer walkthrough is how to choose a home care agency.

Plenty of New Jersey families hire someone directly. It can cost less per hour, and when you already know and trust the person it can be exactly the right call. What has changed is the paperwork.

New Jersey’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights (P.L. 2023, c.262, codified at N.J.S.A. 34:11-69 et seq.) took effect on July 1, 2024 and applies to a caregiver you hire into your own home. Hire privately and you are the household employer, which means:

• A written contract in the worker’s own language for anyone working five or more hours a month who is not doing casual work (N.J.S.A. 34:11-71). The New Jersey Department of Labor publishes a model contract for exactly this.
• Paid rest and meal breaks, including an uninterrupted paid 30-minute meal break every five hours of work (N.J.S.A. 34:11-72).
• A 24-hour rest period for a live-in worker, who cannot be required to work more than six consecutive days without one. It may be unpaid (N.J.S.A. 34:11-73).
• Notice before termination — at least two weeks, and four weeks for a live-in worker (N.J.S.A. 34:11-74). Skip it and the worker may be owed severance.
• Employer registration, tax contributions, workers’ compensation coverage, and hour and pay records. Two households sharing one caregiver can be joint employers, jointly liable for violations.

None of that is an argument that agencies are morally superior. It is an argument about who carries the load. Through an agency, the agency is the employer: it runs the background check, employs the aide as a W-2 employee, carries the insurance and workers’ compensation, supervises the care plan and finds the replacement at six in the morning when your caregiver has the flu. Hire privately and every one of those is yours, including the morning nobody shows up.

The CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, which collected provider rates between July and November 2025, put New Jersey’s median non-medical caregiver rate at $38 an hour — roughly $7,245 a month, or $86,944 a year, on the survey’s standard basis of 44 hours a week. The national median was $35. New Jersey ranked 17th among the states, which surprises people: this is a genuinely expensive state for nursing home care and only modestly above average for care at home.

One change to know about if you are comparing quotes against older articles. For 2025, CareScout merged “homemaker services” and “home health aide” into a single non-medical caregiver figure because the two rates had converged. Asking an agency for a cheaper homemaker rate mostly no longer saves money in New Jersey.

What actually moves your bill is hours, not the hourly rate. Three mornings a week is a different budget from nightly overnight coverage, which is a different budget again from live-in care. Get the schedule right before you negotiate the rate.

Medicare does not pay for this kind of daily help. Long-term care insurance usually does, and New Jersey funds several routes for families who qualify:

• NJ FamilyCare MLTSS, New Jersey’s Medicaid managed long-term services and supports, for people who meet both the financial test and the nursing-home level-of-care test.
• JACC (Jersey Assistance for Community Caregiving), a state-funded program for residents 60 and over who need help with at least three activities of daily living and are not enrolled in Medicaid.
• The Statewide Respite Care Program, which buys a family caregiver a break on a sliding scale of nothing to 25 percent of the cost of services.

The single number worth writing down is New Jersey’s Aging and Disability Resource Connection line, 1-877-222-3737, run by the New Jersey Division of Aging Services. They screen for all of the above at no charge. Our own breakdown of the private-pay side is paying for home care in NJ.

These two get used interchangeably on the phone and they are not the same arrangement.

24-hour care means caregivers working in shifts around the clock, awake the whole time. It is what you want when someone wanders at night, needs repositioning, or genuinely cannot be left alone for an hour.

Live-in care means one caregiver living in the home with sleeping hours and defined breaks. It costs less per day and gives your parent one familiar face instead of three, but it only works if they sleep through most nights and there is somewhere for the caregiver to sleep.

In New Jersey the live-in version carries extra rules worth knowing before anyone moves in. A live-in worker cannot be required to work more than six consecutive days without a 24-hour rest period, and ending the arrangement requires four weeks’ notice. Federal sleep-time rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act can, in some situations, exclude up to eight hours of on-site sleep from paid time. All of which is a long way of saying the terms should be written down before the first night, not argued about after it.

See 24-hour home care, live-in care and overnight care for how each is scheduled and staffed, or hourly care if a few shifts a week is where you are starting.

In 2024 there were 1,706,665 New Jersey residents aged 65 or older — 18.0 percent of the state, up from 13.5 percent in 2010. Across those fourteen years the number of older New Jerseyans grew by 43 percent.

The statewide average hides how differently this lands county by county. Nearly one in four Ocean County residents is 65 or older, at 24.0 percent, with Hunterdon close behind at 23.4 percent, while Union County sits at 15.6 percent. Caregiver availability, wait times and the mix of care families ask for are not the same in a county where a quarter of the population is retired as in one where a sixth is.

We keep the full figures for all 21 counties, alongside each county’s Office on Aging, on how New Jersey is aging, county by county. Two related guides families use constantly: senior transportation in every New Jersey county, and New Jersey senior property tax relief, which compares Senior Freeze, ANCHOR and Stay NJ.

Always Responsive Home Care has been doing this since 2010. It was founded by Teresa Sajkowski, a registered nurse with more than two decades of hospital and hospice experience, and we run 7 New Jersey offices. Care is private pay and non-medical, caregivers are background-checked W-2 employees supervised by a registered nurse, and there are no deposits, no long-term contracts and no cancellation penalties — you pay only for care already delivered.

Pick your county for the local office, the towns it covers and caregivers who already work those streets:

• Home care in Bergen County — 34 towns, from our office at 140 East Ridgewood Avenue in Paramus. Residents 65 and over: 19.8 percent. Call (201) 977-8779.
• Home care in Mercer County — 11 towns, from our office at 116 Village Boulevard in Princeton. Residents 65 and over: 17.0 percent. Call (609) 208-1111.
• Home care in Middlesex County — 29 towns, from our office at 348 Applegarth Road in Monroe Township. Residents 65 and over: 17.4 percent. Call (609) 208-1111.
• Home care in Monmouth County — 45 towns, from our office at 78 Court Street in Freehold. Residents 65 and over: 21.4 percent. Call (732) 201-4141.
• Home care in Ocean County — 29 towns, from our office at 1400 Hooper Avenue in Toms River. Residents 65 and over: 24.0 percent. Call (732) 447-9900.
• Home care in Somerset & Hunterdon County — 55 towns, from our office at 220 Davidson Avenue in Franklin Township. Residents 65 and over: 18.9 percent in Somerset, 23.4 percent in Hunterdon. Call (609) 208-1111.
• Home care in Union County — 22 towns, from our office at 20 Jackson Drive in Cranford. Residents 65 and over: 15.6 percent. Call (908) 691-3660.

Not sure which office covers your parent’s address? The locations and service areas page has a ZIP-code lookup for every town we serve. If you would rather just talk to someone, contact us or call 609-208-1111.