Home Health and Personal Care Aide Salary in Illinois: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A home health and personal care aide in Illinois earns a median of $38,060 a year, or about $18.30 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most aides in the state land between $34,200 at the 10th percentile and $42,500 at the 90th. That state median sits above the national median of $35,800, so Illinois pays this job a little better than the country as a whole.

How Illinois pay compares to the national figure

Illinois pays home health and personal care aides a median of $38,060 a year. The national median for the same job is $35,800, per the BLS (2025). That’s a gap of $2,260 a year in Illinois’s favor, or roughly 6.3% above the U.S. middle. On an hourly basis the state median of $18.30 runs ahead of the national rate by a similar margin.

The reason is a mix of demand and policy. Illinois is one of the larger Medicaid home and community-based services markets in the country, and the Chicago metro alone employs more than 100,000 aides. Wage floors set through state programs and the strong presence of agencies in the city pull the median up. The flip side is cost of living, especially in Cook County, which eats into the higher gross. The table below uses the BLS percentile spread to show where most Illinois aides actually fall.

One thing the spread tells you right away: this is a compressed job. The distance from the 25th to the 75th percentile is under $1,900. Aides cluster tightly around the middle, and the real jumps in pay come from moving into the 90th percentile or out of the aide role entirely, which the later sections cover.

It helps to put the Illinois mean and median side by side. The mean is $38,210 and the median is $38,060, a difference of only $150. When mean and median sit that close, it tells you the pay distribution isn’t dragged up by a handful of high earners. There’s no long tail of aides making double the median, which is common in commission jobs or roles with big bonus structures. Pay here is flat and predictable, and the top of the range, $42,500 at the 90th percentile, is only about 12% above the median. Compare that to professions where the 90th percentile runs 50% or more above the middle. For an aide weighing this career, the takeaway is that the path to meaningfully higher pay almost never runs through staying in the same title and waiting. It runs through credentials, settings, and metro choice.

Home health aide pay in Illinois by experience

The BLS doesn’t track pay by years on the job directly, so the cleanest proxy is the percentile ladder. New aides start near the 10th percentile and climb toward the 90th as they pick up hours, specialties, and a reliable client base. Here’s how that maps to dollars in Illinois using the OEWS 2025 percentiles.

Read the ladder honestly. The move from entry to median is worth about $3,860 a year. From median to senior is another $4,440. But notice how flat the middle is: the gap between the 50th and 75th percentile is just $640. For most aides, the way to break past the experienced band is to add a credential or shift settings, not simply to wait. The senior tier at $42,500 usually means a Certified Nursing Assistant license, a hospice or specialized-care assignment, or a supervisory role with an agency.

Translate the ladder into hourly terms, since most aides are paid by the hour and many work variable schedules. Entry pay of $34,200 a year is about $16.44 an hour at a standard 2,080-hour year. The median of $38,060 is $18.30, and the senior tier of $42,500 lands near $20.43. So the full span from a new aide to a top-decile aide is roughly $4 an hour. That sounds small, but at full-time hours it’s the $8,300 difference between entry and senior pay. The lesson for scheduling is concrete: hours matter as much as rate. An aide at the median rate working a full 40-hour week earns more than an aide at the senior rate stuck with 28 client hours. When you evaluate an agency, ask how many guaranteed hours come with the assignment, not only what the hourly rate is.

Home health aide salary by Illinois metro

Where you work inside Illinois changes the number more than almost anything else short of a new credential. The BLS publishes metro-level medians, and the spread across the state’s largest areas is wide. Chicago sits near the top; Bloomington trails the pack by thousands.

Chicago is the obvious center of gravity. With 108,520 aides, the metro holds the large majority of the state’s 134,100 aide jobs and posts a median of $38,180, just above the statewide figure. Springfield is a close second at $37,900, which is notable because its cost of living is far lower than Chicago’s, so a dollar goes further there. Rockford and Peoria sit in the mid-$36,000s to low-$37,000s. Bloomington is the outlier at $31,200, nearly $7,000 below Chicago, which makes it the weakest metro in the state for this role on a gross basis. If you’re choosing between offers across these markets, weigh the Springfield and Rockford numbers against their cheaper housing before assuming Chicago wins.

The employment counts tell a second story worth reading. Of the 134,100 aide jobs statewide, the five metros listed above account for about 116,460 between them, and Chicago alone is 81% of that. The other four metros combined, Peoria, Springfield, Rockford, and Bloomington, hold under 8,000 jobs together. That concentration shapes your options. Outside the Chicago area, the number of agencies and openings drops sharply, so downstate aides often have fewer employers competing for them, which is part of why Bloomington’s median sits so low. The practical read: Chicago offers the most jobs and a top-of-state median, while downstate markets trade lower pay for a much lower cost of living. The Springfield case is the most interesting, because it nearly matches Chicago’s median ($37,900 versus $38,180) while costing far less to live in. For an aide who can work downstate, Springfield may deliver the best real spending power in the state.

Here’s how far each metro’s median sits from the $38,060 statewide median, which is a quick way to gauge whether a local offer is competitive:

Take-home pay after Illinois taxes

Gross pay isn’t what hits your account. Illinois charges a flat 4.95% state income tax, and federal income tax plus FICA come off the top for everyone. The table below runs each career stage through federal tax, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), and Illinois state tax to show net annual and net monthly pay for tax year 2026.

At the Illinois median of $38,060, an aide keeps $30,736 a year after federal, FICA, and state tax, which works out to $2,561 a month. The effective tax rate at that level is about 19.2%. The senior tier nets $34,084, or $2,840 a month.

Notice how steady the effective rate stays across the whole ladder. Entry pay carries an 18.6% effective rate, the median 19.2%, the experienced tier 19.3%, and the senior tier 19.8%. The rate barely climbs because Illinois uses a flat state tax and the federal brackets these incomes touch are low. The biggest single bite at every level is FICA, the 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare, which is the same percentage for everyone and which you cannot reduce. At the median, FICA takes $2,912, more than the $2,529 federal bill and well above the $1,884 state bill. That’s a useful thing to know if you’re tempted to chase tax tricks: for an aide, there isn’t much room to shrink the tax bill, so the path to more take-home is almost entirely about raising gross pay.

The cross-state comparison that matters. Illinois taxes income at a flat 4.95%, so a chunk of that median gross goes to Springfield every year. Compare the same $38,060 median earned in Texas, which has no state income tax. The Illinois aide nets $30,736; the Texas aide on identical gross nets $32,620. That’s a gap of $1,884 a year, money the Texas worker keeps purely because there’s no state income tax line on the paycheck. Over a decade, with no raises, that’s nearly $19,000 of difference driven by tax policy alone.

Before you book a moving truck, the number that actually decides your life is net pay minus local housing. Chicago rent runs far higher than most Texas metros, so the Texas tax advantage can grow once housing is in the picture, or it can shrink if you’d be moving from cheap downstate Illinois to a pricey Texas suburb. Run your own figure: drop your gross into the Illinois paycheck calculator, then subtract what you’d actually pay for rent. When tax season comes, a tool like TurboTax handles the Illinois flat-tax filing and catches the credits aides often miss, like the Earned Income Credit. ThePayGuide may earn a commission from links on this page at no cost to you. See our editorial policy.

How to earn more as a home health aide in Illinois

The pay band for the aide title is tight, so real raises come from changing what you’re qualified to do or where you do it. Here are the moves that actually shift the number in Illinois.

• Get your CNA license. A Certified Nursing Assistant in Illinois earns a median of $45,960, which is $7,900 more a year than a home health aide. The state requires a Basic Nurse Assistant Training Program of at least 120 hours plus the competency exam. This is the single highest-return step for most aides.
• Move toward the clinical lab or allied-health track. A clinical laboratory technologist in Illinois earns a median of $71,950, which is $33,890 above a home health aide. It takes more schooling, but it shows what the ceiling looks like if you keep climbing the healthcare ladder. Short, stackable courses through Coursera can cover prerequisites and patient-care fundamentals before you commit to a full program.
• Add a specialty. Hospice, dementia, and complex-care assignments pay above the general aide rate and push you toward the 90th percentile of $42,500. Agencies pay more for aides who can handle higher-acuity clients.
• Pick the right metro. Working in Chicago ($38,180) or Springfield ($37,900) instead of Bloomington ($31,200) is worth thousands a year for the same job and the same hours.
• Chase agency seniority and supervisory hours. Lead aide, scheduler, and trainer roles inside home-care agencies carry premiums over straight client hours.
• Maximize qualifying overtime and live-in differentials. Many Illinois home-care contracts pay shift differentials for overnight and weekend coverage, which raises annual earnings without a title change.

Job outlook for aides in Illinois

Demand is the strongest thing this job has going for it. Illinois employs 134,100 home health and personal care aides, per the BLS (2025), and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin accounts for 108,520 of them. Nationally this is one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country, driven by an aging population and a steady shift of care from facilities into the home. That demand means consistent hiring, low risk of the job disappearing, and steady demand for aides who hold credentials. If you’re job hunting, postings move fast on ZipRecruiter, where you can filter by Illinois metro and by agency. The catch on outlook is that high demand has not translated into fast wage growth, because so much of the funding flows through Medicaid reimbursement rates that move slowly.

The size of the Illinois workforce matters for your bargaining position. At 134,100 jobs, this is one of the larger single occupations in the state, and turnover in home care is high, so agencies are almost always hiring. That works in your favor when you have a credential or a clean record and reliable transportation, which downstate especially is a real differentiator. The weakness in the outlook is the ceiling, not the floor. Because reimbursement rates cap what agencies can pay, the median has stayed compressed even as openings have multiplied. So treat the strong outlook as job security rather than a promise of rising pay. The aides who turn this demand into higher earnings are the ones who use the steady work as a base while they train into a CNA or allied-health role, which the next section breaks down with the exact Illinois numbers.

Related and higher-paying roles in Illinois

If the aide pay band feels capped, here’s exactly how the next rungs pay in this state, using BLS Illinois medians against the home health aide median of $38,060:

• A Nursing Assistant (CNA) earns a median of $45,960 in Illinois, which is $7,900 more than a home health aide.
• A Clinical Laboratory Technologist earns a median of $71,950 in Illinois, which is $33,890 more than a home health aide.

Put in context, the CNA step recovers your training cost quickly. A $7,900 annual raise on a 120-hour training program is a strong return, and it keeps you in direct care, which is where most aides want to stay. The clinical laboratory technologist path is a bigger leap, with a median of $71,950 that nearly doubles aide pay, but it moves you out of home care and into a lab setting with a longer education runway. Both are real ladders out of the compressed aide band, and both pay measurably more in Illinois than the $38,060 aide median. The table below sums up the gap so you can see the two options against your current pay at a glance.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), 2025; Illinois Department of Revenue flat income tax rate; ThePayGuide tax modeling for tax year 2026. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.