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How much time do caregivers spend on shift notes?

We do not know what it is across the sector, and we could not find anyone who has measured it. For one agency we worked with, notes took fifteen minutes per shift on 7,500 shifts a year, which is 1,875 hours. At their office rate that was around $47,000 a year. Yours will be different, and the arithmetic to find out is below.

Last updated 28 July 2026. No figure on this page is a sector average. The arithmetic is yours to run on your own numbers.

01 · Why

Why you probably do not know

Nobody bills a client for the time it takes to write up a visit. It sits inside hours you are already paying for, either the caregiver's or the office's, so there is no line item anywhere that isolates it. Your payroll report does not distinguish it. Your scheduling software does not time it. Nobody submits an invoice for it.

That does not make it small. It makes it invisible, which is a different thing, and the two get confused constantly.

There is a second reason. If your caregivers write notes on their own time after the shift ends, you have no cash cost at all, so there is genuinely nothing to find in your accounts. What you have instead is an operation that depends on unpaid work, which is a different problem and arguably a worse one.

02 · The method

How to work it out for your agency

Four numbers. Two you know, one you can count in a week, one you have to be honest about.

shifts per year   = caregivers × shifts per caregiver per week × working weeks
hours on notes    = shifts per year × (minutes per note ÷ 60)
cost              = hours on notes × the hourly rate of whoever writes them

The rate is the part people get wrong. If the office writes up the notes, use your loaded office rate. If a caregiver writes them while on the clock, use their rate. If a caregiver writes them after clocking out, the cash cost to you is zero and the number you have produced is the value of unpaid labour your operation runs on. Do not convert that into a saving. It is not one.

For minutes per note, do not estimate it from memory. Ask three people to time themselves for a week. The gap between what people think it takes and what it takes is usually the interesting part.

03 · The figure

What a typical figure looks like

We cannot tell you. We looked for a published, measured figure for documentation time in US non-medical home care and could not find one, which is a separate piece of work we have written up.

What we can tell you is the shape of the mistake. Agencies who guess tend to guess low, because they are thinking about the writing and not about the chasing, the reading, the correcting, and the finding it again six weeks later when somebody disputes a bill.

04 · The limits

What this is not

This is arithmetic on numbers you supply. It is not a measurement of your agency and it is not a saving. We could not find a published, measured figure for how much of this time software removes, from anyone, including ourselves, and we are not going to be the first to make one up.

05 · Next

Work out your figure with the calculator. It asks for nothing before it shows you the result. If you would rather do it on paper, the full formula is here.

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