Published in Fair Cost of Care on 17/08/2026
As of July 2026, CareCubed Cost of Care’s development team are working towards version 23 and 24 updates. The goal for the development team is to maintain continuous improvements and enhance the tool with a fully integrated user interface over the next two updates, with an excellent user experience.
Version 23
Version 23 is on the near horizon. With several areas of research in progress to support the development of version 23, the team are hard at work ensuring that CareCubed Cost of Care continues to provide accurate and reflective benchmarking data across social care.
Areas of research being explored for version 23 include:
- Head office costs review.
- Managerial and other staff assumptions review.
- Supported Living review.
- Additional staffing types.
- Home nations rates of pay review.
- Building maintenance costs review.
- Clinical waste.
- Children’s social care rates of pay review.
- Return on capital for home nations review.
This research will support version 23 and the continued improvement of the CareCubed user experience.
CareCubed Cost of Care is updated twice a year. The interim data version update acts as a review of the changes made earlier in the year. With no updates to the national minimum wage, version 23 will not reflect any big national changes. Instead, this version will highlight and validate areas already considered and review assumptions of the market.
“We have been conducting user interviews on some of our development ideas, one of which is a case versioning and negotiation history. This would allow people to assign cases to an individual to report on how the needs, and the costs associated with delivering that support, change over time. This will also support the modelling of care delivery without impacting reporting insights” – Lydia Wootton, CareCubed Cost of Care Product Owner.
Future development
While the CareCubed Cost of Care Development team works on version 23, there is also already scope for functional enhancements and research areas for version 24. The team are looking into research for future updates that will further enhance the tool and its user experience.
Research currently being considered and explored by the team includes:
- Additional care models.
- User interface enhancements.
- Reporting enhancements.
While the research from these projects will come later than version 23, the team is working on this research ahead of time to ensure integration of these factors for user access as soon as possible.
