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Service and sales workers · code 5322

Home-based personal care workers

AI can book the doctor's appointment. It can't help someone get dressed with dignity.

Helping clients wash, dress, eat and move AI barely touches. What it could take on is the admin around the care: booking appointments and keeping care records.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Home-based personal care workers provide routine personal care and assistance with activities of daily living to persons who are in need of such care due to effects of ageing, illness, injury, or other physical or mental conditions, in private homes and other independent residential settings. Tasks include - (a) assisting clients with personal and therapeutic care needs such as personal hygiene, feeding, dressing, physical mobility and exercise, communication, taking oral medications and changing dressings, usually according to care plans established by a health professional; (b) maintaining records of client care, changes in condition and responses to care and treatment, and reporting concerns or providing referrals to a health or social services professional; (c) positioning and lifting clients with physical mobility challenges, and helping transport them in wheelchairs and motor vehicles; (d) providing clients and families with emotional support, information and advice on topics such as nutrition, hygiene, exercise, caring for infants or adapting to disability or illness; (e) maintaining clients’ environmental hygiene standards, such as changing bed linen, washing clothes and dishes, and cleaning living quarters; (f) providing psychological support to clients such as through conversation or reading aloud; (g) planning, purchasing, preparing or serving meals to meet nutritional requirements and prescribed diets; (h) providing support to parents and care for newborns during the postpartum period; (i) scheduling and accompanying clients for appointments with medical doctors and other health professionals, or performing other errands. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Home birth assistant - Home care aide - Nursing aide (home) - Personal care provider Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Nurse (professional) - 2221 - Social worker (professional) - 2635 - Nurse (associate professional) - 3221 - Social worker (associate professional) - 3412 - Nursing aide (clinic or hospital) - 5321 Notes Workers who provide personal care to residents of medical and health care facilities that have permanent medical or nursing supervision (such as in hospitals and nursing care homes), and therefore work under the direct supervision of health professionals or associate professionals, are classified in Unit Group 5321: Health Care Assistants. Workers who provide personal care in independent residential settings (including retirement communities with minimal or no on-site medical or nursing supervision) are classified in Unit Group 5322: Home-based Personal Care Workers. Home birth assistants, who provide emotional support and general care and advice to women and families during pregnancy and labour, but not delivery care to reduce health risks, are included here. Care workers who provide care and supervision for children in residential homes and care centres are classified in Unit Group 5311: Child Care Workers.

  • home care aide

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

75 / 100

Mostly holds up against AI

AI can take a few chores off your plate, but most of the day is still yours.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Minimal Exposure

194 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 9 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 24.7 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 24.7 = 75.3.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Minimal Exposure”: A few tasks are affected, but the heart of the job isn't.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Pinch of salt: this number is probably too rosy

It only asks what AI software could do, and this job is 55 out of 100 hands-on. A chatbot can't do that part. A robot might, one day, and nobody measures how close that is.

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Home-based personal care workers 75

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Scheduling appointments and errands.
  • Care records and reports.
  • Visit planning.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Personal care and lifting.
  • Company and emotional support.
  • Noticing when someone is declining.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Remote monitoring between visits.
  • Care apps that coordinate families and carers.
  • Growing demand for care at home.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Low

21 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 47 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Some

55 how hands-on

A fair part of this job is hands-on, so robots would be needed for that part, not just software.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Physical work where helping and caring for people is a big part of the job. For care work, whether a machine could do the movements is only half the question. The other half is whether anyone wants one to. The US data counts helping workmates too, so a few trades end up here.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 31 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

55 How
hands-on
31 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Hands-on, helping and caring for others

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 5 US jobs .

finger skill 32.4 · hand skill 29.2 · cramped spaces 30.4 · averaged · rule: hands-on 50+ · caring 4+ of 7

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 60, against an average of 25. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 60

    Scheduling and accompanying clients for appointments with medical doctors and other health professionals or performing other errands.

    Medium
  2. 47

    Maintaining records of client care, changes in condition and responses to care and treatment, and reporting concerns or providing referrals to a health or social services professional

    Low
  3. 27

    Providing psychological support to clients such as through conversation or reading aloud

    Low
  4. 26

    Providing clients and families with emotional support and information and advice on topics such as nutrition, hygiene, exercise, caring for infants or adapting to disability or illness

    Low
  5. 21

    Planning, purchasing, preparing, or serving meals to meet nutritional requirements and prescribed diets

    Very Low
  6. 14

    Providing support to parents and care for newborns during the postpartum period

    Very Low
  7. 11

    Maintaining clients' environmental hygiene standards, such as changing bed linen, washing clothes and dishes, and cleaning living quarters

    Very Low
  8. 10

    Assisting clients with personal and therapeutic care needs such as personal hygiene, feeding, dressing, physical mobility and exercise, communication, taking oral medications and changing dressings, usually as per care plans established by a health professional

    Very Low
  9. 8

    Positioning and lifting clients with physical mobility challenges, and helping transport them in wheelchairs and motor vehicles

    Very Low

9 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
47
AI does it for you
21

Sidekick wins, by 26 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches this one closely, so this is about as reliable as it gets here.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 4231

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Out of every 100 conversations

46
54

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job. This job makes up 0.1% of the conversations.

The data is sorted by US job, and this one matches 3 of them. We've combined them, counting each by how often it comes up in the conversations, so the busiest one counts most.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should home care workers be worried?

Short answer: not much. Some of the chores will change, and good riddance.

The admin is moving. Scheduling appointments is rated Medium, and care records and emotional support are Low; personal care, meals and lifting rate Very Low. AI and apps take on scheduling and notes; the care stays human.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 39 jobs in the “Service and sales workers” family, averaging 74. This one is above the family average.

Pit this against any other job →

A closer look

There is a written profile for a job in this group.