I've cut down to three days a week and nobody ever offered me an assessment of my own. Am I entitled to one?

#1dee1972(Joined Apr 2025 · 24 posts)May 6, 2026, 12:18 pm

Two years in. My mother has had an assessment of her needs, twice, and a review after the second fall. Between them, four different people have sat in her front room with a laptop and asked her questions.

Not one of them has ever asked me anything except whether I could manage. Which I always say yes to, because what else do you say with her sitting there.

Last month I dropped to three days at work and took the pay cut, and it was only when I was filling in the HR form that it occurred to me that I have never once been assessed, referred, registered or counted as anything. I am not on any list anywhere. Is there actually a thing I am entitled to in my own name, or is that just something the leaflets say?

#2tomsdaughter(Joined Jan 2025 · 31 posts)May 6, 2026, 3:02 pm

There is a thing. Nobody will offer it to you. You have to say the words.

#3ron-at-home(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)May 7, 2026, 9:40 am

Same story here, different country. I am in Australia and for the first eighteen months I did not know the carer side of it existed as a separate thing at all. Everything was routed through his assessment and his services, and I was the transport.

What changed it was ringing Carer Gateway, which does a needs assessment and a support plan for the carer rather than for the person being cared for. I was blunt on the phone about what I could and could not keep doing and that turned out to be the right approach, because the plan is built from what you say. I got planned respite out of it eventually, though it took months and two chases.

The bit I would go back and change is that I described a good week. When they ask how you are managing, do not describe your best week. Describe the Tuesday you posted about at three in the morning.

#4Maura KinsellaAdmin(Joined Sep 2024 · 168 posts)May 8, 2026, 11:15 am

Yes, there is a thing, and in several countries it is not a favour, it is a duty owed to you. It is also the single most commonly skipped step on this whole site, which is why the carer's assessment exists as its own page.

The mechanism first, because it is the same everywhere even when the names are not. There are four separate machines and carers routinely assume they are one. An assessment of the cared for person's needs. A separate assessment or recognition of you, the carer. A payment or a tax relief tied to your hours of care and usually to your own earnings. And a leave entitlement at work. Being counted in one of those does not enter you into any of the others, and that is exactly why you can have had four people in your mother's front room and still be on no list at all.

Where you are, from the way you describe it, the second machine is the Care Act 2014, section 10, "Assessment of a carer's needs for support". The statutory guidance is unusually blunt at paragraph 6.16: where someone provides or intends to provide care for another adult and appears to have any level of need for support, the local authority must carry out a carer's assessment. Must, not may. It is not means tested to get one, you do not have to be living in the house, and it is supposed to consider whether the caring role is sustainable and what it is doing to your work and your education. That last part is the bit I would put in writing given you have just dropped a day and a half of pay.

Ron is right that nobody hands it to you. In practice you ring adult social services, or whatever the equivalent is called locally, and say "I would like to request a carer's assessment for myself", then one sentence of reason and no more, because the whole history down the phone gets you nowhere. Before you hang up, get three things: the reference number, the timescale, and the name and job title of whoever you spoke to. Write all three down with the date and follow it up in writing the same day. If it is refused, ask for the outcome and the reasons in writing, because a refusal is usually a decision that can be looked at again, and people on this board have been turned down once and succeeded on review with the same facts documented properly.

Two other things worth knowing, because they are the ones that stop people asking. You do not need a minimum number of hours: the 35 hours you see quoted belongs to the payment, which is a different machine. And you do not need the agreement of the person you look after. If she has refused her own assessment, yours still stands.

What the systems do next is where they stop resembling one another, so take the mechanism from here and the current number from the official source. The UK carer payment is Carer's Allowance, which needs 35 or more hours a week and weekly earnings at or below £204 after deductions, and was worth £86.45 a week as at April 2026, with Scotland having moved to a different payment called Carer Support Payment. Ireland runs a means tested Carer's Allowance alongside a Carer's Support Grant of €2,000 for 2026, paid automatically in June to people already on the carer payments. Australia has the Carer Gateway route Ron describes plus Carer Allowance at $162.60 a fortnight. The United States has no carer's assessment right of that kind at all; what exists is the National Family Caregiver Support Program under the Older Americans Act, reached through your Area Agency on Aging, which funds respite and carer training rather than assessing you. Canada's is a tax credit rather than a payment, so it arrives a year late and only if you were earning enough to use it. Carer benefits compared has all of them side by side with the dates on.

One warning about the earnings condition, because it catches people in exactly your position. Dropping to three days can move you over or under a threshold in ways that are not obvious, and in some systems the payment is lost entirely a pound over the limit rather than tapering. Check before you assume, not after.

#5K. McAllister(Joined Nov 2025 · 11 posts)May 14, 2026, 5:33 pm

Adding the US version for anyone finding this later, since Maura mentioned it. I rang our Area Agency on Aging expecting to be assessed and that is not what happens. What I got was a caseworker, information, a support group I never went to, and eventually a few hours of respite. Useful, but it is help you apply for rather than a status you are given, and there is no form anywhere with my name on it as a carer.

#6dee1972(Joined Apr 2025 · 24 posts)June 22, 2026, 7:47 pm

Rang, said the exact sentence, and the woman on the phone said "right" and booked it without any argument, which after two years of assuming it did not exist was almost annoying.

It happened three weeks later, in my kitchen, and it lasted an hour and ten minutes. Most of it was questions I had genuinely never been asked, including whether I get a break, whether I sleep, and what would happen to my mother if I could not do this next month. I did what Ron said and described the bad week. I cried at the sleep question, which I had not planned on.

What has come out of it so far is a referral for a sitting service one afternoon a fortnight and a form for something I have not filled in yet. Not life changing. But I exist on a system now, and if this gets worse there is a record that starts in May rather than starting from nothing.