From a distance of 10, 20 or 30 years (depending on where you are now!) funding the cost of going into a care home for the last few years of your life might not seem like a big priority.

But when you take into account that the cost for an average 30-month stay now varies between £50,000 and £93,000 – depending upon where you live in the UK – it’s a large lump of money to disregard if you are making concrete plans to provide a comfortable retirement for yourself and/or your partner. 

Or if you have hopes of leaving the value of your home to your heirs.

What’s more, that figure could easily go much higher if you live in a more expensive part of the UK, if the stay is in a specialist home (eg, dementia) or if your condition means you are there for far longer than a couple of years.

The new figures come from research carried out on by mutual insurer Royal London. Their research found that variations in house prices around the UK relative to care costs available locally meant that the cost of a typical residential care home stay could range from 18% up to 56% of the value of the average house.

Because of the huge gap in house values between different parts of the country, while those in the South East (for instance) will pay far more for their care than those in areas such as the North East, that cost will be far lower relative to the value of the average home. So swings and roundabouts!

But that, of course, ignores the fact that many of us will be paying for our care without selling our home – because we have the available assets in other funds, and we will still have a partner or other dependents living in the family home.

The rule of thumb is that if you have over £23,250 of realisable assets when you go into a care home, you will be expected to fund your own care – either until you pass away or the money runs out.

So have you allowed for care costs in your future scenarios? If you are hoping that – by the time you get to the point of needing care – that the State will stump up for at least part of it, you might be disappointed. The much-heralded “Dilnot” report, which led to a Government pledge to cap care costs, has been kicked into the long grass.

And the figures also come out at a time when the care sector is facing a potentially very rocky future. A recent Panorama report found that a large swathe of private sector care providers are now handing back council contracts because they simply can’t make the figures work.

Yes, the Government has just announced a £2 billion boost to the sector, but that is a sticking plaster solution stretched over three years to a much bigger problem. Care homes will be closing as a result of the constraints on public spending, and a reduction in choice could well lead to further rises in the cost of care for every user.

All in all, it’s not a pretty time for the care sector and the most likely solution for a cash-strapped Government and our local authorities will be to make sure that those who have the wherewithal to pay for their own care will do so.

That also covers those who want care provided in their own home.

So if you think it’s important to include future care costs in your future retirement planning, why not check how this will affect your calculations on your RetireEasy LifePlan. And if you’re not sure just how much it might cost, there’s no need to guess. You can see exactly what difference it will make to your future capital and assets by allocating a range of amounts through the “scenario” option, using the Premium Version.