Five years in care is worth ten pence an hour. The state's fix arrives in April 2028.

Start from the ground, because that is where the number lives. In December 2025, Skills for Care, the official statistics producer for the adult social care workforce, measured what experience is worth in England's independent care sector. A care worker with five or more years in the sector was paid, on average, ten pence an hour more than a colleague new to it. On the median rate of £12.60, ten pence is 0.8 per cent. Five years of lifting, washing, medicating and sitting with people at their worst, priced at less than one per cent.

It was not always this number. Before March 2017 the same series ran between 26p and 37p; in March 2016 it stood at 33p. By 2021 it had collapsed to 5p, and it has moved between 5p and 10p since, standing at 6p as recently as March 2025. The honest reading is not that experience buys less every year; the series is volatile. The honest reading is that the reward for experience fell hard within the last decade and has not recovered.

The ladder is flat above as well as below. A senior care worker now earns 6 per cent more than a care worker; in March 2017 the premium was 11. And the floor beneath is crowded: 26 per cent of care workers were paid at or within ten pence of the legal minimum in December, up from 22 per cent in March 2025.

The report's own comparison table places the £12.60 median 4p below cleaners and domestics and 1p below sales and retail assistants, measured in the same December. A Band 3 healthcare assistant in the NHS with two or more years' experience earned £1.00 an hour more. One caution on dating, because it matters: the £12.60 median is a December 2025 measurement, and the current wage floor of £12.71 arrived in April 2026. Care workers are not paid below the minimum wage. The newest published measurement simply predates the current floor, and sat 11p below where the floor now stands.

Hold those three facts together: the reward for experience is flat, the reward for promotion is thinning, and the floor is rising to meet them both. That is what a career being priced out of a sector looks like from the inside.

Now, and only now, the state. On 16 July the government put dates on its remedy: an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body set up by the end of 2026, first negotiations commencing in April 2027, and a first Fair Pay Agreement settlement introduced by April 2028, backed by £500 million for the first agreement in 2028-29. The record of that day disagrees with itself in one place. The ministerial statement in Hansard says the independent chair will be appointed this autumn; the same day's announcement on gov.uk says early 2027. Both are on the record, both dated 16 July, and we print both.

So the two dates this piece rests on are these. The compression was measured in December 2025. The remedy is dated April 2028. Between the measurement and the earliest settlement sit twenty-eight months, and between this morning and that settlement sit twenty.

No single government owns the series. The premium collapsed under one party's decade and has stayed flat into another's, which is the point this paper keeps making about speed rather than tribe. The wage floor rises every April by statute, whoever governs, and nothing in the machinery does the same for experience. The floor is automatic. The ladder is a negotiation whose body has not yet met.

On 16 July we reported the unpaid half of British care, the work done for free that saves the state around £184 billion a year. This is the paid half, and the two halves make one picture: the work this country relies on most is the work it prices least carefully.

Care is where human work holds out: the sector that stayed human while the machines arrived elsewhere. What the December data says staying is worth is ten pence an hour. What the state has put behind the fix is £500 million, arriving from April 2028. The distance between those two sentences is where 910,000 care workers are living now.