The honest opening number
Not the guru's $3,000. Not the consultant's $80,000. Your state's published fees, your bond premium, your insurance class, your screening costs — and the payroll runway nobody budgets: the weeks you pay caregivers before the first client payment lands.
State fees, bond minimums and insurance minimums are dataset facts — checked against the licensing authority and dated. The rest are planning figures, labeled as such on every line: business formation (~$300 mid-range), a bond premium at roughly 2% of the bond amount, non-medical liability insurance at a $2,800 first-year planning estimate, a policies-and-procedures manual at the $0–$2,500 midpoint, screening at ~$75 per hire. Your quotes will differ; the structure will not. The line to watch is the runway: caregivers × hours × wage × weeks of payment lag. For most founders it is bigger than the license fee by an order of magnitude — and it appears in almost no "startup cost" article, because articles are not the ones who have to make payroll.
Every state's own fee lines are on its state page, and the full table is the 50-state dataset.
The free checkers give you the verdict and the number. The Kit gives you the working papers: your state's application packet walked through in filing order, the policies-and-procedures binder spec (what your binder must contain — never a boilerplate binder), the administrator self-audit, the insurance & bond spec sheet, the Medicaid gate map, the franchise-vs-independent 10-year worksheets, and the payroll-runway planner.
$49 one-time payment
Included in the $49 HomeCareLicenseCheck Kit
