A personal care aide provides various services to a person who is unable to care for themself on their own. These duties may include things like cooking food, picking up heavy objects, dressing, bathing, using the restroom, and performing simple housekeeping tasks. The main types of people that personal care aides serve are the physically disabled, the cognitively impaired, the chronically ill, and the elderly.

Some aides work with just one specific client, while others work with several clients individually. Other aides may work with multiple clients at the same time. For example, a live-in residential aid may only have one client. Another residential aide may travel between the homes of clients throughout the day. Other aides may work in group setting like hospitals, nursing homes, and adult daycare centers.

An aide who works in an adult daycare center with the cognitively impaired may, for example, find that their main duty is assisting the individuals they care for in finding and using the restroom. An aide who works for an elderly person at their private residence may need to assist the person with carrying in the groceries, reaching a plate that is on a high shelf, or cutting up vegetables for dinner. Of course, the duties of personal care aides may sometimes go well beyond the simple measures listed here.

In order to be a personal care aide, one needs complete on-the-job training. There is no degree required to be a personal care aide, so even those that did not graduate high school can find employment in this field. Although, someone with an associate's degree may also consider themself to be qualified to be a personal care aide, without needing to complete on-the-job training. However, experience is considered to be a plus by many employers of personal care aides. In certain hospitals or other institutions, potential aides need to attend training and pass a standardized exam before they can be hired. In order to help patients take medication, some states require that personal care aides take other exams or pass certain standards. These exams and standards vary from state to state.

Personal care aides work in a variety of different workplaces. As mentioned above, these workplaces can vary from hospitals, nursing homes, adult daycare centers, and other institutions, to people's private residences. In major cities, most personal care aides are employed in large, group care settings. In rural areas, home care aides are generally employed by individuals to care for them or their family members in their own, private residence. Each of these work settings comes with its own challenges and benefits. The pay varies between work settings as well, but this will be discussed further in the salary section.

Many aides report their jobs to be highly stressful and demanding. Some aides report working more than 40 hours a week. Other aides claim their work is stressful because they constantly have to deal with their clients becoming ill or dying. However, most personal care aides claim they are fulfilled by their work, and enjoy going to work every day.

The median salary for personal care aides is $20,170 per year. That is roughly $9.70 per hour. Employment of home care workers is expected to grow by nearly 70% over the next ten years, which is well above the projected growth level for most other professions. Over 1 million new personal health aide jobs are expected to be added in the next decade. The salary of these workers is expected to rise as more jobs are added into the system. With the growing age of baby boomers, younger aides to care for them will become in high demand, resulting in higher pay increases for qualified workers. The salary for a personal care worker is higher than most other professions available to a person that has not graduated high school or attained a GED. It is important to note that the salary of a personal care worker does vary greatly from location to location. Personal care workers employed in bustling cities sometimes make over double the median salary. At the same time, personal care aides employed in rural, low-income areas often make far below the median.