How to register a care at home service with the Care Inspectorate in Scotland

If you are starting a home care business in Scotland, the body you have to satisfy is the Care Inspectorate. Its statutory name, used throughout the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 and the 2011 regulations that sit under it, is Social Care and Social Work Improvement Scotland, usually shortened to SCSWIS. Care Inspectorate is the operating name, and it is the one you will see on every page, form and invoice.

This guide is about getting registered, not about staying compliant afterwards. Inspection, grading, annual returns and quality frameworks are a separate discipline, and they are covered in the companion piece on Care Inspectorate compliance for Scottish care at home services. What follows is the registration journey in the order a real applicant meets it, with the fees and timescales dated and attributed, and with an honest note wherever the regulator's own published position is unclear. It is the deep dive on Step 5 of the wider guide to starting a home care agency in the UK.

What you are actually registering, and why the name matters

Scotland has no "domiciliary care agency" registration and no "regulated activity" vocabulary. Both are English. The statutory service type is a support service, defined at schedule 12 paragraph 1 of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010. The Care Inspectorate's sub-category for home care appears in three different wordings depending on which page you are on: "Support service - care at home", "Care at home service", and, on the fee table itself, simply "Support - care at home". They are the same registration. If you go looking in the fee table for the longer string you will not find it.

You may need two registrations, not one

Housing support is a legally distinct service type under schedule 12 paragraph 19. The Care Inspectorate's applicant guidance is explicit that a housing support service and a support service (care at home) require individual applications even where they are to be operated as one combined service. Providers supporting people in sheltered or supported accommodation are routinely caught out by this after they have already paid one fee.

The solo carer exclusion is narrower than most guides claim

Schedule 12 paragraph 1(2)(c) is often quoted as meaning a self-employed carer working alone is exempt. Read it properly: it disapplies only limb (d) of the definition, the catch-all covering "any person if it includes personal care or personal support". Limbs (a) to (c) are untouched. So an individual delivering all the care personally to someone who engages them directly is generally outside registration, but the same individual delivering a package under arrangements made by a local authority falls within limb (b) and is still registrable. If your model sits anywhere near this line, take legal advice, because the consequence of getting it wrong is criminal rather than administrative.

You cannot trade first and register later

Under section 80(1) of the 2010 Act, providing a care service while unregistered is an offence, punishable on summary conviction by a fine at level 5 on the standard scale, imprisonment of up to three months, or both. Do not sign contracts, accept packages or start visits before the certificate is granted.

If you have read a CQC guide, here is what does not apply

A large share of the "how to register a care agency" content online is written from an English template with the nation swapped in the title. The differences are not cosmetic. Working through this table first will save you weeks. There is a fuller side by side treatment in the four nation compliance comparison.

Come to this from the wrong part of the UK and you want a different guide. The parallel walkthroughs are CQC registration in England, CIW registration in Wales and RQIA registration in Northern Ireland.

Before you open the application form

The Care Inspectorate expects you to have read and understood, before applying, the requirements every registered service must continuously meet: the 2010 Act, the Registration Regulations (SSI 2011/28), the Applications Order (SSI 2011/29), the Requirements for Care Services Regulations (SSI 2011/210), the Health and Social Care Standards, and the staffing duties in sections 7 to 10 of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019, which were fully commenced on 1 April 2024 and reach support services through the interpretation provision at section 11.

The Health and Social Care Standards, My support, my life, were published in June 2017 and came into force on 1 April 2018. If a guide tells you Scotland uses the "National Care Standards", it is out of date by the better part of a decade.

Pre-application advice, and a contradiction worth knowing about

The Care Inspectorate's registration guidance page (last updated 19 May 2026, so check it is still current) says you should only request pre-application advice in specific situations: if you plan to use a building or premises to deliver the service, or if you have never applied to register a care service before. Most first time care at home applicants qualify on the second limb. Note that the older library guidance on requesting advice, dated March 2021, recommends advice generally with no such restriction. Two live regulator documents disagree, so if you are refused advice, that is why.

The mechanism is not a phone call. You create your portal account, start an application, work through the "Before you begin" guidance pages, and a "Request advice" button then becomes available. You must have completed your contact details, proposed service type and information about who will use the service, or the submit button stays disabled and your typed message is lost when you navigate away. The Care Inspectorate says a member of the registration team will be in touch within 10 working days, though you should treat that as the published aim rather than a guarantee. General questions go to the contact centre on 0345 600 9527 (check the current number on the regulator's site). Note that the Care Inspectorate does not provide technical help filling the form in.

Dispersed services

If one manager will be responsible for a single service operating from more than one location or through more than one team, read the guidance on registration of dispersed services. Registration as a single dispersed service is at the Care Inspectorate's discretion and the burden of evidencing it sits with you.

The application itself: the Digital Portal

New registrations are made online through the Care Inspectorate Digital Portal at portal.careinspectorate.gov.scot. There is no paper application pack any more, despite what several well ranked third party guides still say. Sign in, choose "Register a care service and manage my applications", then "Apply to register a new service".

The portal is not the same system as eForms. The portal handles applications, variations, going inactive and cancellation. eForms handles annual returns and most statutory notifications. Forms have been migrating between the two, and the Care Inspectorate publishes a "Digital portal or eForms?" table telling you which system each form currently lives in. Bookmark it.

The form is dynamic, so you are shown only the sections relevant to your applicant type and service type. You can save as you go, upload documents and pay inside the application. Two answers decide everything downstream, and getting either wrong can mean starting again with a fresh fee:

• Applicant type. Complete the individual applicant part only if you are a self-employed sole trader. If you are a company, partnership, association, committee, SCIO, unincorporated body or local authority, you complete the "applicant who is not an individual" part. That includes the sole director of a limited company, which the Care Inspectorate treats expressly as an organisation.
• Whether you already provide registered services. Answer yes only if the new service will be provided by the exact same legal entity, and quote your provider number, which begins SP. Never quote a CS service number.

Organisation details must match Companies House or OSCR exactly, including the registered address. Where individuals are missing or the details differ from Companies House, the Care Inspectorate will return the application for amendment or reject it outright.

What it costs, and what it keeps costing

The figures below are as published on the Care Inspectorate's fees pages, both last updated 21 July 2026 and checked on 1 September 2026. The pages carry no fee year label, so treat these as current rather than as set for a stated year, and re-check the fees table before you budget. Fees are set by Scottish Ministers, and Scotland is currently the only one of the four UK nations that charges to register at all.

On the same 21 July 2026 fees pages, one WTE is defined as 40 hours a week, and the count covers everyone employed to provide and manage the service, not just carers. Housing support carries identical bands and amounts, which is why the combined service trap is expensive. Where you apply for both, the Care Inspectorate invoices rather than taking payment up front, and its guidance tells you to record the full staff WTE on the housing support application and 0.1 WTE on the care at home one.

The application fee is non-returnable in every scenario, including refusal, withdrawal and rejection for incompetence, and a rejected application that has to be resubmitted may attract a further fee. Variations, cancellations and replacement certificates are shown as free on the current fees pages, though the three month notice periods still apply. A 15 per cent discount is available on the smaller service's continuation fee where two separately registered services share premises, staff, management and policies, but not where that continuation fee is under £500, and it is not automatic; the same fees pages set out the conditions, so check them before relying on it.

The annual continuation fee is the line most start-up guides omit entirely. Its due date is set by the calendar quarter in which you first registered, not by your accounting year, there is no refund or part year discount, and inactive services still pay it.

The costs that sit outside the Care Inspectorate

• PVG. Joining the PVG scheme is £59, and confirmation of existing scheme membership for someone already in it is £18, both paid by the individual to Disclosure Scotland under the Fees for Scheme Membership and Disclosure Applications (Scotland) Regulations 2025. Confirm the current amounts with Disclosure Scotland before you budget.
• The PVG fee waiver. This matters, because it can make many of those £59 checks free. The Scottish Government currently pays for PVG applications from eligible social care workers taking up a new job, or a new position with an existing employer, in listed roles, and care at home and housing support are both listed. The window in force covers applications received by Disclosure Scotland between 1 August 2026 and 31 July 2027, claimed by putting the prefix FSC in the "Position Applied For" field and selecting invoice as the payment method, so you are not actually charged. Treat those dates as a moving window and check the current gov.scot waiver page. Whether it covers a person registering as the provider and manager of their own service is not addressed in the guidance, so ask gov.scot rather than assume.
• Disclosure Scotland accredited body registration, if you want to countersign your own staff checks: on the current mygov.scot guidance, £125 a year covering the lead signatory and up to four countersignatories, then £15 for each one added later. Check the current figures before you commit. The alternatives are an umbrella body or asking the Care Inspectorate to undertake checks for you.
• SSSC fees, per worker, every year. See the workforce section below.
• GP and bank reference fees. The Care Inspectorate confirms you pay these but sets no figure, because it does not set the charges.

One further Scottish cost line that no English model contains, and it is not a registration fee: from April 2026 the minimum hourly rate for workers delivering direct adult social care in commissioned services in the third and independent sectors rose to £13.45, up from £12.60. It is a wage floor attached to Scottish public funding rather than anything the Care Inspectorate charges, but it belongs in any Scottish cost model that touches council or NHS funded work. Check the current rate on gov.scot, because it is uprated over time.

The documents you have to produce

This is the working checklist. Nearly all of it is drawn from the Care Inspectorate's "Guidance for applicants on applying to register a care service", the core document, which carries a publication date of 13 July 2021 and is still hosted as current. Where its procedural detail conflicts with the newer pages on the Care Inspectorate website, prefer the newer pages, and check the guidance is still the current version before you rely on any page count or form name in it.

Write your medication policy against Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland guidance, not NICE, and your protection policy against the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007, not Care Act section 42. An off the shelf English policy pack is a genuine registration risk. If you would rather start from something already written for the right nation, the homecareOS policy library is nation aware.

On fire safety, be careful. The Care Inspectorate's fire safety page states without qualification that an application will not be concluded without a completed Fire Safety Checklist, yet the applicant guidance discusses fire safety entirely in terms of premises used to deliver care, and reserves Fire Scotland confirmation for 24 hour residential based services. No published page addresses a care at home service with no care delivery premises. Ask the registration team rather than guessing either way.

PVG and the fitness checks: the step people get wrong

Since 1 April 2025, PVG scheme membership has been a legal requirement rather than good practice. Anyone carrying out a regulated role, paid or voluntary, with children, protected adults or both must be a scheme member before carrying out that role.

For your own check as an applicant, the critical rule is this: the Care Inspectorate must be the countersignatory to your scheme record, so it initiates the application. Its guidance says in terms that you should not apply directly to Disclosure Scotland for scheme membership or undertake checks yourself. The Care Inspectorate determines who needs a check, completes the first part, and Disclosure Scotland then emails you a link to complete your section. The July 2021 applicant guidance says that link is active for seven days only, after which you must contact the Care Inspectorate to restart the process. The current PVG page describes the email but states no duration. Treat it as a same week job either way. Applicants who buy their own PVG check first have wasted the money and still have to do it again.

Alongside PVG, the Care Inspectorate assesses integrity, character and financial background, and where you will also manage the service, your skills, knowledge and experience. It checks the databases of other professional bodies including the SSSC, reviews any previous regulatory history, and runs online searches of publicly available information, contacting Police Scotland if it has concerns. Its guidance is explicit that this is not an exhaustive list.

The disqualifying grounds are wider than most applicants expect and they bite on every listed individual, not just the applicant. Under regulation 3 of SSI 2011/28 and regulation 6 of SSI 2011/210 they include relevant custodial convictions, undischarged bankruptcy or sequestration, bankruptcy restrictions orders, undischarged trust deeds or arrangements with creditors, current receivership or administration, removal as a charity trustee, company director disqualification, and equivalent proceedings outside the UK.

Checking your own staff

To countersign PVG checks for your carers you must register your organisation with Disclosure Scotland as an accredited body, use an umbrella body, or ask the Care Inspectorate to do checks on your behalf. Regulation 13 of SSI 2011/210 bites directly: a person on the adults' list must not provide, manage or be employed in a care service for adults.

Your manager, and the SSSC registration nobody budgets for

Section 59(2)(b) of the 2010 Act requires the application itself to identify an individual, who may be you, who is to manage the service. Regulation 17 of SSI 2011/210 requires a provider that is not an individual, or that will not be in full time day to day charge, to appoint a manager and notify the Care Inspectorate immediately. Regulation 7(c) of SSI 2011/28 then puts the manager's full name on the certificate of registration. That is the whole mechanism. There is no separate manager application, no separate fee and no CQC style manager interview.

The qualification question, and the two numbers you will see

The Care Inspectorate's applicant guidance says it expects managers to hold, as a minimum, a level 7 practitioner qualification for the registration category, in line with SSSC criteria. The SSSC's own published benchmark for managing a care at home service is higher and has two parts: a practice qualification benchmarked at SVQ Social Services and Healthcare at SCQF level 9, and a management qualification benchmarked at SVQ Care Services Leadership and Management at SCQF level 10, or a mapped management award at or above SCQF level 9 with a minimum of 60 credits. Both statements are published by their respective regulators and nothing reconciles them. Recruit to the SSSC benchmark and you cannot be caught out. A registrant can be registered on condition of achieving the qualification, but must achieve it within the first five years of registration.

Your whole workforce registers, not just the manager

On 3 June 2024 the SSSC Register was restructured from 23 parts to four: social workers, social work students, the social care workforce, and the children and young people workforce. Care at home staff register on the social care workforce part. Manager, supervisor, practitioner and support worker are now job role levels within that part, confirmed by the employer when endorsing an application, rather than separate registers. One consequence of the restructure is that a worker doing more than one social care role is normally registered once, not once per service, so ignore older guidance telling you to register the same person twice.

The deadlines are hard and they are the employer's legal responsibility. A worker starting a new role must apply within three months and be registered within six. If they are not, they may not be able to work. Fees are per worker, per year: the SSSC's published 2026/27 fee table lists £28 for the support worker level, £39 for supervisor and practitioner, and £80 at manager level, on a schedule that rises through to 2029/30. Check the SSSC's fee table for the current figures before you build them into a model. Set up your lead countersignatory in MySSSC before your first carer starts, not after.

How long it takes, and what actually causes delay

The Care Inspectorate aims to assess applications within six months. That aim is expressly conditional on you supplying a competent and fully detailed application, plus any additional information requested, and you should read it as a published target rather than a promise. No median or actual processing time is published, so treat anything you read presenting a shorter number as current performance with suspicion.

The more useful insight is where the clock actually starts. The published internal timings run like this: once every fitness check document has been received and processed, the Care Inspectorate contacts you within 10 working days to say which inspector has been allocated for stage 2, and that inspector contacts you within a further seven days to arrange to meet or ask for more information. Crucially, no inspector is allocated until all fitness check documentation is in. Your PVG record, your two references, your GP corroboration, your social work declaration and your financial evidence are all gating items. An application that appears to be sitting with the regulator is very often waiting on your GP.

Plan your own sequencing accordingly. Approach referees and your GP practice early, complete the Disclosure Scotland link the day it arrives, and identify your manager before you need to. Given the six month aim, the fitness gate and the fact that a rejected application starts again, it is sensible to allow considerably longer than six months from starting the form to holding a certificate, and not to commit to premises, contracts or staff before it arrives. That longer planning figure is an inference from the published aim and internal clocks, not a regulator statistic.

You can withdraw at any time through the portal. Fees are not refunded, but withdrawing does not affect future applications to register a care service, which is worth knowing if your circumstances change mid-process.

The decision, the conditions, and what happens if you are refused

The allocated inspector assesses four things: the fitness of the applicant, whether you have appointed a suitable manager and how you propose to recruit staff, whether any premises are fit for purpose, and how you propose to operate the service. Your aims and objectives statement carries a lot of weight here, as do your policies and your proposed quality assurance systems.

Under section 60 of the 2010 Act the Care Inspectorate may grant unconditionally, grant subject to conditions, or refuse. Most commonly it grants subject to agreed conditions. The proposed conditions, together with the proposed provider name, service name and address, are communicated through the portal. Check every word for errors and contact your inspector immediately if anything is wrong, because these are published on the public register. Accepting the conditions in the portal registers you automatically.

If you do not agree the proposed conditions you have 14 days to respond in writing. If the Care Inspectorate proposes to refuse, or to grant on conditions you have not agreed in writing, it must serve a notice of proposal, and you have 14 days to make written representations. Section 75 of the 2010 Act then gives a right of appeal to the sheriff within 14 days of notice of the decision, and section 75(2) sets out what the sheriff may do. The Care Inspectorate's own guidance states that the deadline becomes 17 days where the notice was posted, which reflects the deemed service rule in section 101, and that the sheriff's decision is final. Both of those additions come from the regulator rather than from the face of the statute, so check the current guidance. You cannot operate while an appeal is pending.

After the certificate arrives

Print the certificate and display it. This is a statutory duty, not a courtesy: section 60(5) requires the certificate or a copy to be kept in a conspicuous place in each premises from which the service is provided and, if different, the principal office, and failure is an offence at level 2. Note that two current Care Inspectorate pages disagree about where the certificate is issued, one saying the digital portal and one saying the eForm portal. Check both.

Regulation 4 of SSI 2011/28 requires the Care Inspectorate, on granting registration, to tell you which records you must keep and where, which matters you must notify, and what goes in your annual return. Notifications start immediately, and they are split across two systems. Change of manager, changes of provider, ownership, officers, partners or committee members, changes of name, address and contact details, and a proposed application to cancel are all digital portal items. Accidents, incidents, allegations of abuse, allegations of misconduct, controlled drug medication incidents, deaths, injuries to a person using the service, outbreaks of infectious disease, appointment of liquidators or receivers, unfitness of a manager or provider, and absence of a manager for more than 28 days are eForm items.

One notification exists almost uniquely for your service type: an increase or decrease in staff WTE by 10 per cent, which applies to care at home, housing support and nurse agencies only, and is submitted on the digital portal. It interlocks with the fee bands above, so growth past 3 WTE or 15 WTE is both a notifiable event and a change in what you pay.

Also on the recurring list: the annual return through eForms, the annual continuation fee, and a published duty of candour report for every financial year, required by Part 2 of the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc. and Care) (Scotland) Act 2016 and the Duty of Candour Procedure (Scotland) Regulations 2018, even in a year where nothing triggered the duty. Variations need three months' notice and start with a conversation with your inspector, only one variation can be open at a time, and any change of legal entity means cancelling the old registration and applying afresh. There is no transfer of registration in Scotland.

Your first inspection will be unannounced. The Care Inspectorate publishes no fixed window for a newly registered service, saying only that frequency and timing depend on the information and data it holds. Start self evaluating against its quality framework for support services from day one rather than waiting.

Where homecareOS fits

Two things decide a Scottish application: whether you can produce a clean pack of documents, and whether, once registered, you can put your hands on the records an inspector asks for without a scramble. Both are systems problems more than they are effort problems. homecareOS ships with a nation aware UK policy library and a guided registration checklist, and the platform derives regulator and terminology from your nation setting, so a Scottish agency sees PVG, SSSC and Care Inspectorate language rather than DBS and CQC. It is priced by your carer headcount. Office staff and service users are not counted, and it is free for your first 5 carers, with no time limit and no credit card, then Pro at £10 per active carer per month, so the smallest agencies can begin at no cost; current rates sit on the pricing page. If you want a second pair of eyes on a registration pack before you submit it, Philip Martin also works with pre-registration providers through independent advisory.