Nursing Home Prices Are Rising Faster Than Almost Everything in Health Care — While the Sector Just Lost 8,700 Jobs in a Month

Nursing home care is getting pricier faster than just about any other corner of American health care — and the people providing it just lived through the worst month for job losses in nearly five years.

That’s the picture painted by Altarum’s latest health care spending brief, which tracks prices and spending across the medical economy. Nursing home care prices climbed 3.7% in the year through September. Overall health care prices? They rose just 2.1% over the same stretch.

Nursing home pricing has accelerated by nearly a full percentage point over the past two years, even as broader medical inflation cooled. Hospitals, at 3.3%, and physician practices, at 1.3%, both trailed nursing homes. Home health agencies held the line at 1.1%. Only dental offices, where prices jumped 6.0%, outpaced the sector.

Costs Up, Spending Growth Down

Here’s the paradox: even as prices climb, spending growth is softening. Nursing home care spending grew 6.7% between August 2025 and August 2026, down from 8.3% the year before. Home health slid harder, falling from 17.7% to 7.8%. Prescription drug spending growth nearly collapsed, dropping from 7.8% to 1.3%. Hospital care was the lone outlier, picking up speed from 7.5% to 7.9%.

Nursing homes aren’t the worst offenders in the broader economy, either. The consumer price index rose 3.7% in September, matching the sector’s pace, while producer prices jumped 6.3%. But against health care specifically, nursing facilities stand out — and that gap lands hard on operators whose revenue is largely locked in by government payers.

The Jobs Picture Turns Ugly

Then there’s employment. Nursing and residential care facilities cut 8,700 jobs in September, the largest one-month drop since January 2022, according to the brief. Nursing homes themselves accounted for 1,600 of those losses; the rest came from other residential care settings. That’s a stark reversal for a field that had been adding an average of 5,100 jobs a month over the previous year.

The September slide still leaves payrolls 50,400 positions above where they stood a year earlier. But nursing facility employment remains stuck essentially where it was before the pandemic — and the timing couldn’t be worse. States and the federal government are pouring money into recruitment right now, with a new hiring push that could hand nurses up to 0,000 for committing to work in nursing homes.

Wages tell a similarly frustrating story. Nominal pay in nursing and residential care rose 3.3% year over year in August — the fastest growth of any major health care subsector. Adjusted for inflation, though, workers aren’t actually getting ahead. Real wages in the sector have been flat.

For an industry trying to claw its way back to full staffing, the combination is a bitter one: prices rising faster than anyone else in health care, spending growth cooling anyway, and payrolls suddenly shrinking. Something has to give heading into 2027.