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Adult Specialist Care UK Market Report Seventh Edition

 A market now fully dependent on the independent sector

LaingBuisson's fully revised seventh edition explores a market with rising demand for specialist care and housing for younger adults, and reveals a social care market now entirely reliant on independent providers. With this authoritative insight into the UK’s adult specialist care market, including market sizing, funding trends, capacity, investment, and commissioning, you can make important informed decisions.

Seventh Edition
Adult Specialist Care UK Market Report

Authored by William Laing | Published: 17th July 2025 | pp. 422

This fully updated seventh edition of LaingBuisson’s Adult Specialist Care UK Market Report provides a comprehensive analysis of services for working-age adults (18–64) with long-term care needs. It covers the care and housing needs of groups including learning disabilities, autism, mental health conditions, acquired brain injury, substance misuse, early-onset dementia, and complex physical and sensory disabilities up to the financial year 2024/25.

The report examines a £19.0 billion UK market that is now entirely dependent on the independent sector for service delivery. It details demand and segmentation, with learning disabilities and autism dominating expenditure at £8.8 billion in England alone. Based on the latest data up to March 2025, we estimate that over 750,000 younger adults are in receipt of long-term care in the UK and this number is only set to expand, driven by demography.

The report explores the interplay between demographics, funding constraints and investment appetite. Despite a decade-long fall in aggregated operating profit margins for adult specialist care home groups (from 27% in the immediate pre-austerity period to 15% for statutory accounts ending in the year 2024),  the market continues to attract strong private equity and REIT interest. This is supported by society’s long-term commitment to high-cost, high-need individuals. It also assesses trends in supported living and residential settings, regional commissioning gaps, the role of housing supply, and how workforce pressures have eased post-Covid.

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LaingBuisson is the chosen provider of independent sector healthcare market data to the UK Government’s Office for National Statistics.

What's inside?

  • The Market outlines a £19 billion sector in detail, segmenting value, volume and demand across settings and client groups.
  • Politics and Regulation are examined through the lens of recent reform, regulatory risk, and diverging approaches across UK nations
  • Detailed analysis of Payors and how local authorities, the NHS and private funders shape care models, pricing and commissioning decisions.
  • The Market Structure reveals key benchmarks, provider concentration, capacity change, and ownership across care homes and supported living.
  • Investors are profiled in terms of assets held, recent transactions and strategies in both property-backed and operational businesses.

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“The £19 billion spent on adult specialist care is ultimately underpinned by society’s willingness, in the UK as in all other OECD countries, to spend large sums on the care of younger adults with the highest levels of need. Individual lifetime costs sometimes run into several millions of pounds."

 

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William Laing, Report Author, Executive Chairman and Founder, LaingBuisson

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