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

A home health and personal care aide in Texas earns a median of $24,230 a year, or about $11.65 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most aides in the state land between $21,980 and $31,560, depending on experience, metro, and the agency that pays them. Texas has no state income tax, so the gap between gross pay and take-home pay is smaller here than in almost any other state.

How Texas pay compares to the national median

Here’s the part most searchers want first: Texas pays home health and personal care aides below the national rate. The BLS national median for this role (SOC 31-1120) is $35,800 a year. The Texas median of $24,230 sits $11,570 lower, which works out to roughly 32 percent below the national figure. That’s one of the wider state-to-national gaps for this occupation.

A big driver is the structure of Texas home care. The state runs a large Medicaid personal-attendant program, and reimbursement rates anchor a lot of aide pay near the floor. The mean (average) annual wage in Texas is $26,070, a little above the median, which tells you a small group of higher-paid aides pulls the average up while the typical worker sits closer to $24,000. With 329,590 aides employed statewide, Texas is one of the largest home-care labor markets in the country, so even a below-average wage reflects a deep, active job market.

It helps to read the gap in monthly terms, because that’s how rent and groceries actually hit. The national median of $35,800 works out to roughly $2,983 a month gross. The Texas median of $24,230 is about $2,019 a month gross. That’s a difference of about $964 every month before any tax. Part of that gap closes once you account for taxes, since Texas takes no state cut and many high-paying states do, but the raw wage difference is large and worth naming plainly. The mean-to-median spread of $1,840 in Texas also tells you there is real room above the typical wage if you target the right metro, the right setting, and the right credential, all of which the sections below break down with the BLS numbers.

One more framing helps before the details. The BLS figure for this role covers both home health aides and personal care aides under a single SOC code, 31-1120. In practice that bundles agency-employed clinical aides with personal-attendant and companion-care workers, and the personal-care side tends to sit lower in the distribution. So if you hold a clinical home health aide certificate, you’re more likely to be reaching toward the 75th percentile ($27,520) than the floor, even though the combined median reads $24,230.

Home health aide pay by experience in Texas

Pay for this role doesn’t climb steeply with tenure, but it does move. The BLS percentile spread is the most honest way to read experience, since it shows what the bottom, middle, and top of the Texas market actually earn. An entry-level aide near the 10th percentile makes about $21,980. A seasoned aide near the 90th percentile reaches roughly $31,560. That’s a spread of about $9,580 from floor to ceiling, or close to $4.60 an hour.

The 25th to 75th percentile band, where most working aides sit, runs from $22,820 to $27,520. Moving up usually means picking up a specialty (memory care, hospice support), taking hard-to-staff shifts, or stacking certifications that let an agency bill at a higher rate.

Notice how compressed the bottom of the range is. The jump from the 10th percentile ($21,980) to the 25th ($22,820) is only $840 a year, and the 25th to the median ($24,230) adds just $1,410. The pay starts to open up higher in the distribution: the median to the 75th percentile is a $3,290 step, and the 75th to the 90th is a $4,040 step. The lesson for a new aide is that the first couple of years rarely move your wage much on their own. The real gains live at the top of the curve, and they go to people who add a skill or a setting that an agency can bill for. Time served alone keeps you near the floor.

Read in hourly terms, the entire experience range runs from about $10.57 at the 10th percentile to $15.17 at the 90th. That $4.60-an-hour spread is the full width of what tenure, specialty, and location can do for a Texas aide who stays in this exact role. To clear that ceiling you generally have to step into an adjacent job, which is what the related-roles section covers.

Where the aide story differs from many other healthcare roles is that the curve stays flat for a long time. A nurse can roughly double pay across a career. A Texas aide who never changes role or setting will likely move from about $22,000 to maybe $27,000 over many years. That’s why the practical advice on this page leans so hard on metro, setting, and credential rather than on simply waiting for raises.

Home health aide salary by Texas metro

Where you work inside Texas changes your paycheck more than your years on the job do. Dallas-Fort Worth pays the most of the five largest metros, with a median of $26,900. Houston pays the least of the group at $23,440, despite having the largest aide workforce in the state. The gap between the top and bottom metro here is $3,460 a year, which is real money on a wage this size.

The Rio Grande Valley metros, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission and Brownsville-Harlingen, employ a huge number of aides (over 68,000 combined) at medians near the state floor. San Antonio sits comfortably in the middle at $25,960. If you can commute or relocate within Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio corridors are where the pay leans highest.

It’s worth weighing pay against the cost of living before you read these medians as a relocation plan. Dallas-Fort Worth pays the most at $26,900, but its housing and commuting costs also run higher than the Valley’s. McAllen and Brownsville pay near the floor ($23,960 and $23,500), yet their rents are among the lowest of any metro in the country, which means a $23,500 paycheck there can stretch further than a $26,900 paycheck in central Dallas. San Antonio at $25,960 is often the sweet spot: a wage above the state median paired with housing costs well below the big-metro level. The five metros in this table together account for roughly 222,000 of the 329,590 aide jobs in Texas, so this is where most of the state’s hiring and most of the wage variation actually happens.

Inside any one metro, the agency you sign with matters as much as the city. Two aides in the same San Antonio ZIP code can earn $3 an hour apart depending on whether their agency bills Medicaid personal-attendant rates or private-pay and long-term-care insurance. When you compare offers, ask what the agency bills the payer, because that number sets the ceiling on what they can pay you.

Take-home pay after tax in Texas

Texas is one of nine states with no state income tax, so an aide here keeps more of each dollar than a worker on the same gross wage in most other states. The only mandatory deductions are federal income tax and FICA (Social Security and Medicare, 7.65 percent of wages). The table below runs the four percentile points through 2026 federal rates for a single filer taking the standard deduction. State tax is $0 across the board.

Here’s the cross-state comparison that the no-tax status really buys you. Take the Texas median aide earning $24,230. Their net take-home is $21,453. An aide on the exact same gross wage in California would net about $21,187 after California’s state income tax kicks in. That’s a gap of $266 a year in Texas’s favor on an identical paycheck. It’s modest at this wage because California’s lowest brackets are gentle, but the advantage widens fast as pay rises, and it stacks every single year you work.

Reading the table top to bottom shows how gently the effective tax rate climbs in a no-income-tax state. An entry aide at $21,980 keeps about 89 percent of gross, with a combined federal-and-FICA effective rate near 10.8 percent. A senior aide at $31,560 keeps about 87 percent, an effective rate near 13.2 percent. The whole range stays under 14 percent because there’s no state layer on top, and because aide wages sit in the lowest federal brackets. In a state like California or New York, that same worker would see another deduction line and a smaller net on every row of this table.

The number that actually matters for your life is net pay minus local housing. A $1,788 monthly take-home stretches very differently in a Rio Grande Valley town than it does in central Austin or Dallas. Before you accept an offer, subtract your real rent from that net-monthly figure, then judge the job. A higher Dallas median can disappear entirely once Dallas rent comes out. You can model your own number with the Texas paycheck calculator, and if you want help squaring withholding at tax time, a tool like TurboTax walks through the federal-only filing that most Texas aides face.

ThePayGuide may earn a commission from links on this page at no cost to you. See our editorial policy.

How to earn more as an aide in Texas

The ceiling on a basic personal-care aide role in Texas is low. The fastest raises come from adding a credential or stepping up to an adjacent role that bills at a higher rate. Concrete moves:

• Get your CNA. A certified nursing assistant in Texas earns a median of $37,500, which is $13,270 more than the home health aide median. This is the single highest-return step from where you stand.
• Chase the higher-paying metros. Moving from a Houston or Valley agency to Dallas-Fort Worth can add up to $3,460 a year for the same work, based on the metro medians above.
• Take specialty and hospice cases. Memory-care and hospice-support clients often command premium pay and push you toward the 75th to 90th percentile band ($27,520 to $31,560).
• Stack certifications. Short, stackable courses in medication aide training, CPR, and patient care fundamentals, including options on Coursera, help you qualify for agencies that bill at higher Medicaid and private-pay rates.
• Pick up hard-to-staff shifts. Overnight, weekend, and live-in cases frequently carry differentials that lift effective hourly pay above the $11.65 median.
• Move toward private-pay clients. Agencies serving private-pay and long-term-care-insurance clients are not capped by Medicaid reimbursement, so their aides more often reach the $27,520 to $31,560 top band.

Run the math on the CNA move, because it’s the one with the biggest payoff. Going from the $24,230 aide median to the $37,500 CNA median is a 55 percent raise for what is usually a few weeks of state-approved training plus a competency exam. Even measured against the experienced aide wage of $27,520, the CNA median is still $9,980 higher. For most aides reading this page, the certified nursing assistant credential is the highest-return single step available, and it keeps you in the same care setting you already know.

Job outlook for aides in Texas

Demand is the strong point of this career, even if pay isn’t. Texas already employs 329,590 home health and personal care aides, among the largest counts of any state. An aging population and a steady shift toward in-home care over facility care keep the openings coming, and turnover is high, so agencies hire constantly. The practical takeaway: finding a job is rarely the hard part in Texas. Negotiating a wage above the $24,230 median is. When you search, filter by the higher-paying Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio metros and by agencies that offer shift differentials. Active listings across the state are easy to compare on ZipRecruiter.

Because this is one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country by raw job count, the bargaining power in any negotiation tilts toward the worker more than the low wage suggests. Agencies lose aides constantly and pay to recruit replacements, so a reliable aide with a clean record and a CNA or medication-aide credential has room to ask for the top of an agency’s pay band, weekend differentials, or guaranteed hours. The thing to remember is that demand protects your ability to find work, not your wage. The wage you walk away with comes from the metro you choose, the payer your agency bills, and the credentials you bring to the table.

Related and higher-paying roles in Texas

If you want a meaningful raise, the clearest path is into a role one rung up. Both common next steps pay far more than a home health aide in Texas:

• A Nursing Assistant (CNA) in Texas earns a median of $37,500, which is $13,270 more than a home health aide in Texas.
• A Clinical Laboratory Technologist in Texas earns a median of $59,290, which is $35,060 more than a home health aide in Texas.

The CNA step is the natural next move: similar work, similar setting, a few weeks of training, and a $13,270 bump to the median. The clinical laboratory technologist path is a bigger leap that calls for an associate or bachelor’s degree and a clinical rotation, but it more than doubles the aide median and gets you off the bedside-care wage floor entirely. If you’d rather stay in personal care and just want to know how Texas stacks up against other states, the sibling pages below carry the same BLS breakdown for California, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) 2025; federal and FICA tax rates for tax year 2026. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.