Care rota scheduling software: spreadsheet, product or bespoke, with the prices.

Regulation 18 of the fundamental standards says that sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced persons must be deployed to meet people’s care and treatment needs. CQC’s guidance on it says providers should have a systematic approach to determining the number of staff and range of skills required, that staffing levels and skill mix must be reviewed continuously, and that there should be procedures to follow in an emergency so that both the emergency and the routine work are covered. Regulation 17 requires records about the people employed and the management of the regulated activity to be maintained securely and created, amended, stored and destroyed in line with legislation.

Put those together and the rota is the document that proves Regulation 18 was met on a given Tuesday. Under the single assessment framework, the "safe and effective staffing" quality statement asks whether there are enough qualified, skilled and experienced people, including agency staff, and whether they work together effectively. An inspector who asks how you know a visit was covered by someone with the right training is asking a rota question.

That is the argument for treating the rota as a system of record rather than a grid someone fills in. A spreadsheet can hold a plan; it cannot prove what happened, who was qualified, or that the change made at 7am on Sunday was made by someone entitled to make it. This guide sets out the workforce numbers a rota has to absorb, the legal rules it has to enforce, what UK rota and care software costs as published, a worked example for a 60-carer domiciliary provider, and where a small bespoke build around a product pays for itself.

Skills for Care’s 2025 report, covering 2024/25, puts the adult social care workforce in England at 1.71 million posts, of which 111,000 were vacant, a vacancy rate of 7.0 per cent and down from a peak of 10.5 per cent in 2021/22. The improvement is uneven. Domiciliary care had the highest vacancy rate at 9.7 per cent while residential care had the lowest at 4.4 per cent, and the separate domiciliary summary, using CQC’s non-residential definition, puts it at 9.9 per cent with 59,000 vacant posts.

Turnover is the number that actually shapes a rota. Skills for Care estimates 23.1 per cent across directly employed staff, about 335,000 leavers in the year, and 28.5 per cent for care workers and support workers. In domiciliary care specifically it was 29.0 per cent, with 42 per cent of care workers on zero-hours contracts. International recruitment, which filled the gap for two years, fell from 105,000 starters in 2023/24 to 50,000 in 2024/25. Nine per cent of the workforce is indirectly employed through bank, pool or agency.

For a rota, those figures mean that roughly one carer in four leaves every year, that a tenth of the posts a domiciliary provider is trying to fill are empty at any moment, and that the plan for next week will be wrong by Thursday. A rota tool is judged on how it handles the change, not the plan: how quickly a vacated visit is offered to someone qualified and nearby, whether the offer respects that person’s hours and rest, and whether the client’s preference for a familiar face survives the reshuffle.

The Working Time Regulations 1998 set the hard constraints. Regulation 4: working time, including overtime, must not exceed an average of 48 hours for each seven days over a 17-week reference period, unless the worker has opted out in writing. Regulation 10: a rest period of not less than eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period. Regulation 11: an uninterrupted 24 hours in each seven days, or two such periods or one of 48 hours in each fourteen days. Regulation 12: a 20-minute break where the working day exceeds six hours. A rota that is built by hand checks these when someone remembers; a rota engine checks them on every change.

Pay rules matter too, because the rota decides what is paid. The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour from April 2026, up from £12.21. HMRC’s guidance on the hours for which the minimum wage must be paid lists "travelling from one work assignment to another, for example a care worker driving from one client to another between appointments" as working time, while travel between home and work is not. A rota that sequences visits badly therefore creates paid time with no care in it, and a rota that under-records travel creates a minimum wage liability.

The Homecare Association’s minimum price for an hour of homecare in England for 2026/27 is £34.42, defined as the amount needed for legally compliant pay, travel time, mileage, wage on-costs and the minimum contribution to running a care business. The average price actually paid in 2025/26 was £24.36. Providers living inside that gap cannot afford a rota that wastes paid travel, which is the strongest commercial case for getting the sequencing right.

A spreadsheet is genuinely fine at small scale, and providers are often made to feel embarrassed about it unnecessarily. It stops working at a specific point: when a change to one visit requires checking three other things, and the person who understands the dependencies is the only one who can safely make the change. That is a continuity risk as much as an efficiency one, and it usually arrives before anyone admits it, because the person holding the complexity is also the person who would have to explain it.

A product is the right next step for almost everyone. Care management systems handle care records, visit logging, electronic medication records and rota building well, at prices set out below, and they carry the evidence trail that Regulation 17 asks for. Start there, and stay there for the core. The choice between them is less about features, which converge, than about whether the vendor publishes a price, what the minimum term is, and whether your data can be exported in a usable form if you leave.

Bespoke earns its place around the product, not instead of it, in three situations: continuity of carer treated as a hard constraint rather than a preference, realistic travel time in your actual geography rather than a straight-line estimate, and compliance evidence generated at the moment of the visit rather than assembled the week before an inspection. Those are specific to your area and your clients, which is exactly why generic software struggles with them.

Prices read on the vendors’ own pages on 14 September 2026, excluding VAT where the page says so. Care-specific systems price per carer or per service user; general rota tools price per user. Several well-known care platforms do not publish prices at all, which the table records rather than guesses. Where a vendor quotes a minimum monthly fee or a minimum contract term, that is included, because for a small provider the minimum is often the real price.

RotaCloud shows a per-employee slider; the 1 to 5 band is the default displayed. Deputy and CareLineLive state prices exclude VAT. Prices change; the vendor page is the authority.

Every product in the table builds a rota. Where they tend to disappoint is the awkward specifics. Continuity of carer is usually a preference weighting, which means the system will quietly break it when the alternative is an unfilled visit, and nobody is told. Travel time is usually a fixed number of minutes or a straight-line estimate, which is wrong in rural areas in one direction and in cities in the other. And the evidence for an inspection is usually a report you run afterwards, which reconstructs rather than records.

A bespoke layer around the product does three things. It reads the product’s rota through its API or export, checks every change against the rules you actually care about, including the Working Time Regulations limits, the client’s continuity requirement and the real drive time, and refuses or flags the ones that fail. It records who changed what and why, at the moment of the change, so the Regulation 17 record is a by-product of running the service. And it produces the staffing evidence for a given day on demand, in the form an inspector asks for, from data that already exists.

None of that requires replacing the product staff already know. We would advise against replacement in almost every case; the disruption costs more than the licence, and a coordinator who has to learn a new screen in the middle of a 9.7 per cent vacancy rate will not thank anyone. The layer reads from the product and writes back to it, so the care records and the visit log stay exactly where they are, and the only new thing anyone sees is a flag when a rule is about to be broken.

Take a domiciliary provider with 60 carers delivering an average of 30 hours of care each a week, which is 1,800 care hours a week and 93,600 a year. At the 2025/26 average price paid of £24.36 an hour, that is about £2.28 million of revenue. Skills for Care’s turnover rate for domiciliary care workers of 29.0 per cent implies about 17 leavers a year, so the rota is rebuilt around a new person every three weeks. The 9.7 per cent domiciliary vacancy rate implies that about six of the 66 posts the provider is trying to fill are empty at any moment.

Software first. At Deputy’s Core plan, 60 users cost £255 a month, or £3,060 a year. At CareLineLive’s eRoster rate, 60 carers cost £486 a month, or £5,832 a year; with the carer app on the Bring Your Own Device plan, £1,182 a month, or £14,184 a year. Even the dearest of those is 0.6 per cent of revenue. The licence is never the expensive part.

The expensive part is paid travel with no care in it. Suppose visits average 45 minutes, which gives about 124,800 visits a year, and that better sequencing removes three minutes of paid travel per visit. That is 6,240 hours a year at the £12.71 National Living Wage, or £79,310, before on-costs. Whether three minutes is the right number for your geography is exactly what the first two weeks of a build establishes, and the result is that a £4,000 to £10,000 layer around the product is paid for by a fraction of a minute per visit.

The evidence side does not reduce to a number as neatly, and we will not pretend it does. What can be said is that an inspection that asks for the staffing record on a given day is answered in minutes from a system that captured it, and in days from one that has to reconstruct it, and that the second kind of answer is the one that goes wrong.

Care hours per carer, visit length and minutes saved are assumptions, stated so you can replace them. Revenue uses the Homecare Association’s 2025/26 UK average price of £24.36 an hour.

Use a product for care records and rota building. Build around it for the constraints it ignores: continuity, travel geography, evidence capture. Then automate carer recruitment, because with turnover near 29 per cent it is usually a larger commercial problem than scheduling, and the same principles apply to applicants that apply to visits: minutes matter. Add family communication last, because it removes calls but does not fill shifts.

The recruitment point deserves a sentence more. A 60-carer provider replacing 17 people a year is running a permanent hiring campaign, and applicants for care roles apply in the evening and hear back in office hours like everyone else. The same-hour acknowledgement, screening and interview booking that we describe in our guide on why applicants go cold applies directly, and it is usually the second build we recommend to a care provider, after the rota layer.

Augustova’s ladder for this work is a single process at £4,000 to £10,000, which is where a rules and evidence layer around an existing product sits, a business application at £10,000 to £20,000 where the provider needs a coordinator’s console and reporting of its own, and a platform with a carer mobile app at £20,000 to £30,000 or more, which we only recommend when no product fits at all. All fixed price against a written scope, excluding VAT, and you own the code.

We read the CQC regulation pages and the single assessment framework quality statement on cqc.org.uk, the Working Time Regulations on legislation.gov.uk, the GOV.UK minimum wage pages, the Skills for Care 2025 executive summary and domiciliary care summary PDFs, and the Homecare Association’s published pages, on 14 September 2026. The Homecare Association’s full cost breakdown is behind a member login and is not cited. Vendor prices were read on the vendors’ own pricing pages the same day and are quoted as displayed. Where a vendor does not publish prices, the table says so. The worked example’s care hours, visit length and travel minutes are our assumptions and are labelled as such. We build the bespoke layer described here and have priced it from /pricing.