The Care Workers’ Charity welcomes Skills for Care’s The Size and Structure of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England, 2025/26, which reports the lowest vacancy rate in a decade and another year of growth in filled posts. This is real progress, and it reflects the commitment of a workforce that has held this sector together through some of its hardest years. The report is also candid that this progress rests on foundations that are not yet secure, and that is the picture we see in the care workers we support every day.

The headline numbers are encouraging. Filled posts rose 1.4% to 1.59 million, the vacancy rate fell to 6.2%, and turnover dropped to 23.6% (Skills for Care, 2025/26). The commitment behind those figures is not in doubt. Our 2025 Wellbeing Survey of more than 2,000 care workers found that 87% feel they make a real difference to the people they support (The Care Workers’ Charity, Wellbeing Survey, 2025). This is a workforce that wants to stay.

But the recovery was built on international recruitment while the domestic workforce shrinks. Posts filled by British nationals fell by 40,000 in a single year and by 130,000 since 2020/21 (Skills for Care, 2025/26). We see the other side of this directly: our 2025 Impact Report set out how internationally recruited workers can lose their employment and housing when a provider's sponsor licence is revoked, and in 2025 we awarded £84,000 to 191 displaced recruits through our International Recruitment East project alone (The Care Workers' Charity, Impact Report, 2025). That route is now closing, with international arrivals into direct care down from 105,000 in 2023/24 to 30,000 in 2025/26 (Skills for Care, 2025/26). 

At the same time, the path to security for those already here has lengthened, with the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain extended to 15 years. The sector is asking these workers to stay while making it harder for them to build a stable life in the country they are helping to care for.

With both pipelines under pressure, the case for making care a career people choose at home has never been more urgent. The reasons people leave are not a mystery. Our Wellbeing Survey found 72% of care workers do not feel financially secure and 37% often think about leaving, with pay the leading reason. 

Skills for Care projects an extra 410,000 posts will be needed by 2040 to keep pace with the ageing population. Rising demand, a falling domestic workforce and a closing international route cannot be reconciled without a serious plan to recruit and retain people at home, and a fair settlement for the international workers already here.

Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive of The Care Workers’ Charity, said: “This report is good news, and we should say so. A vacancy rate at its lowest in a decade is the result of hundreds of thousands of people choosing this work, often for far less than it is worth. 

“But Skills for Care are right to be honest about what holds that progress up. We have grown the workforce from overseas while the number of British care workers has fallen by 130,000 in five years, and the visa route that made that possible has now closed. At the same time, we are asking the international care workers already here to wait 15 years for indefinite leave to remain, which is a long time to ask someone to hold their life in place. 

“The way to build a stable workforce is to make care a job people can afford to do, and to give the people already doing it a fair route to settle. We are ready to work with Government, employers and commissioners to turn this progress into something that lasts, and to bring care workers into shaping the plan that does it, through our Care Worker Advisory Board.”

What needs to change

The Care Workers’ Charity is calling on Government to:

• Set out a credible plan for domestic recruitment and retention, with the pay and conditions needed to attract and keep a British and settled workforce as the international route narrows.
• Bring forward interim pay measures now, ahead of the Fair Pay Agreement.
• Provide a stable, fair settlement for the internationally recruited care workers already here.
• Co-produce workforce planning with care workers themselves, through bodies such as the Care Worker Advisory Board.

www.thecareworkerscharity.org.uk