Last Updated on April 14, 2026

The King’s Fund’s annual Social Care 360 report has been published, finding an increase in adult social care spending on provider fees. The report also found that while there has been an increase in the number of people receiving support, it has come at the cost of weakening financial health of English councils. This is the eighth edition of the report, tracking the state of the social care sector each year.

The King's Fund's report highlighted that care home provider fees paid by councils rose in real terms by an average of 3.6% to £1,823 a week for working age adults and for older people by 3.3% to £1,019 a week compared with 2023/24's figures.

Homecare fees rose 3% to £23.56 an hour. In addition, an additional 30,000 people received publicly funded long-term care in 2024/25 compared to the previous year, representing a 3% rise from 859,000 to 889,000. It has meant that total spending on social care by local authorities reached £34.5bn, a real terms increase of 4.1%.

However, according to The King's Fund, it has resulted in the rise of external debt and fall in usable reserves as councils attempt to cover these increased costs whilst meeting their statutory obligations. The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accounting (CIPFA) found that last year English councils external debt rose by 10% and their usable reserves fell by 4%. Councils are also having to fund spending on social care through increases in charges on service users and cuts in other areas such as libraries, roads and waste disposal.

Even with these measures, half of councils with social care responsibility say they are likely to have to apply for emergency Government bailout agreements within the next three years, according to a Local Government Association survey.

Lastly, despite the increase in fees, and expanding the number of people receiving care, the report finds that social care providers are struggling to meet their rising costs and charging privately funded clients more to help make ends meet.

The King's Fund's Social Care 360 report said that 'the picture for social care remains precarious' and that it would put 'significant pressure on the Government to ensure stability in the sector in the medium term and on the Casey Commission to identify coherent proposals for funding and wider reform in the long-term'.

Commenting on the report's findings, Simon Bottery, Senior Fellow for Social Care at The King's Fund, said, 'Local authorities have gone to great lengths over the past year to fulfil their statutory obligations. They have spent more money on social care, with that investment not just going towards the increase in provider fees but also expanding the number of people receiving care.

'This will have improved the quality of life for the thousands of additional people now in receipt of care and given the challenging financial backdrop should be welcomed. However, it has come at great cost to local authority budgets and ultimately is not sustainable.

'We are long overdue a national conversation about how to properly reform social care so that it provides the support people need is organised and is funded in a way that does not put at risk other local authority services and their overall financial health.'

Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive at Care England, said, 'Government continues to focus on the size of the funding increase, but the real test is what that funding delivers. Right now, the outcome is clear. Councils are being placed in an impossible position, with adult social care consuming the majority of their budgets while costs continue to rise faster than funding. That forces difficult trade-offs with other local priorities, and those pressures only intensify as elections approach.

'If funding does not match the true cost of care, it does not deliver sustainability. Success should be judged on whether councils can meet their duties and whether providers can operate sustainably, not on the headline figure announced at the Budget. That is where the system is currently falling short.

'Support for working-age adults is often complex, specialist and resource-intensive, yet funding trends suggest it is not being prioritised accordingly. That creates a clear risk to the stability of these services. This is not a marginal pressure. It goes to the heart of whether people with the most complex needs can access consistent, high-quality support, both now and in the future.'

Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive Officer at The Care Workers' Charity, said, 'This report confirms what we see every day, a sector that is making progress, but on foundations that are not yet strong enough to hold. Falling vacancies are welcome. Rising pay is welcome. But when pay growth is slowing, when domestic recruitment is declining, and when the workers who kept this sector going through a pandemic now face a 15-year wait for the security they were promised, we cannot call this a success story.

'Care workers are not asking for gratitude. They are asking for a system that is honest about what they do, what it costs and what it is worth. The Fair Pay Agreement is a step in the right direction, but steps in the right direction do not help the care worker who cannot cover their bills this month, or the senior care worker who earns 7p more per hour than a colleague on their first day. We need pace, we need funding that is genuinely ringfenced, and we need political will that does not run out of steam before the people it is meant to help ever feel the difference.'

To read the latest annual Social Care 360 report, visit The King's Fund website.

In other news, Dementia UK has launched a new palliative and end of life care report, A better death: fixing palliative and end of life care for dementia.