How to register a domiciliary care agency with RQIA in Northern Ireland

Registering a home care agency in Northern Ireland is not difficult in the way people expect. The requirements are unusually precise, which is helpful. What catches applicants out is sequencing, paperwork that must be produced in a specific form, and a small number of steps that only exist in Northern Ireland and have no equivalent anywhere else in the UK.

This guide walks the process in the order you will actually meet it, from working out whether you need to register at all through to the day the certificate arrives. It deals with getting registered. Staying registered is a separate discipline, and a separate article.

Who regulates you, and what you are registering

Home care in Northern Ireland is regulated by the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority, universally known as RQIA. It was created by Article 3 of the Health and Personal Social Services (Quality, Improvement and Regulation) (Northern Ireland) Order 2003 as the Northern Ireland Health and Personal Social Services Regulation and Improvement Authority, and was renamed the Health and Social Care Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in April 2014. Its registration team works out of James House in Belfast, and every piece of registration business is transacted through the RQIA Web Portal.

Nothing from England applies here. The Care Quality Commission, the Care Act 2014 and the Single Assessment Framework stop at the Irish Sea, as do Care Inspectorate Wales and the Care Inspectorate in Scotland. If you have arrived in the wrong nation, the equivalent guides are CQC registration in England, CIW registration in Wales and Care Inspectorate registration in Scotland.

Three documents govern what follows. The 2003 Order is the parent statute and creates the duty to register. The Domiciliary Care Agencies Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2007 set the service-specific rules. The Domiciliary Care Agencies Minimum Standards are what RQIA measures you against, and it is worth knowing they were issued by DHSSPS in August 2011 and amended only once since, in August 2021, when the registered manager qualification requirements at pages 49 to 52 were rewritten. RQIA's filename says 2021. The substance is mostly 2011, which explains why parts of it reference bodies and law that have since changed.

This article is about getting registered. What happens afterwards, once you are being inspected and making statutory notifications, is covered in our guide to RQIA compliance after registration. Registration is step five of starting a home care agency, and it gates everything that comes after it.

Do you actually have to register?

The trigger is the service type, not a list of regulated activities. Article 2(2) of the 2003 Order, subject to Article 2(8), defines a domiciliary care agency as an undertaking which consists of or includes arranging the provision of prescribed services in their own homes for people who, by reason of illness, infirmity, disability or family circumstances, cannot provide those services for themselves without assistance. Regulation 3 of the 2007 Regulations prescribes those services as personal care, and assessment of the need for such care. Personal care is the operative phrase.

There are two carve-outs worth knowing about. Regulation 4 excepts an undertaking carried on by an individual who is not in partnership with anyone, is not employed by an organisation to carry it on, and employs nobody else. That is the genuinely solo self-employed carer. Take on one employee or one partner and registration becomes mandatory. Separately, the Minimum Standards state they do not apply to employment agencies which solely act as introducers of workers employed by the service user or their carer or representative, for example through a private arrangement or under Direct Payments. If you are running an introduction-only model, read that exclusion carefully before assuming either way.

Two things do fall inside the definition and are frequently missed. Services accredited by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive under Supporting People arrangements that also provide personal care must register as domiciliary care agencies, as must intentional communities run by voluntary organisations where personal care is part of the service.

You must also pick a sub-type at application. RQIA splits domiciliary care agencies into Conventional and Supported Living. Choosing the wrong one means a variation application later. And if you intend to supply registered nurses as well as care workers, a nursing agency is a separate service type with its own registration and its own fee, so you would need both.

Carrying on or managing an unregistered agency is a criminal offence under Article 12 of the 2003 Order. That second limb matters: a manager who starts managing before their own registration is granted commits an offence in their own right, which is a real exposure when a service begins trading while the manager's application is still being resubmitted.

The first move: you cannot open your own portal account

Everything runs through the RQIA Web Portal at portal.rqia.org.uk, and you cannot self-register for it. The starting point is the How to register with RQIA form, linked from the top left of the portal. It asks for the service type, where you select Domiciliary Care Agency (DCA) from the dropdown, the service name, your provider type, the provider name, and your own name, email, date of birth and telephone number.

Settle your provider type before you fill it in, because it shapes everything downstream. RQIA recognises Sole Person, Partnership and Organisation, the last covering limited companies, registered charities and registered societies with or without a charitable objective.

RQIA then validates the form, emails you a temporary password and telephones you separately to give you your username, a CT number. You need both to log in. That handshake is a genuine gating step and it is not instant, so build it into your timeline rather than assuming you can start on a Sunday evening. If you are unsure whether you need to register at all, RQIA expressly invites you to email its registration team, given as registration@rqia.org.uk in its current guidance, before you complete the membership form; confirm the address on RQIA's contact page if the two ever differ. GOV.UK's licence finder lists (028) 9051 7500 for the registration team, though RQIA's own contact page publishes only the email address, so treat the number as worth trying rather than guaranteed.

Three applications, not one

This is the single biggest structural surprise. There is no combined application. You submit three, and they interlock. The page counts given below come from RQIA's 2025 applicant guidance, so treat them as current at the time of writing rather than fixed.

1. The service application. Completed by the provider or someone with provider-level permissions. Seven pages.
2. The responsible person application, form F05. Required in every case, whether you are opening a new service, taking over an existing one or changing your provider entity. Thirteen pages.
3. The manager application, form F01. Completed by the proposed registered manager themselves. Twelve pages.

The manager physically cannot begin until you have created them as a delegated portal user. From your homepage you go to the Permissions tab, then Delegated Users, select the service, and click Create User, adding them as a new contact or, if they already hold a portal account, as an existing contact using their CT number. You must grant Full Access to the registration of new manager form or the option will simply not appear for them. You then forward their CT number; their password is emailed to them automatically. Sequencing errors at this point routinely cost weeks.

Partnerships have an extra step. All applicants complete a Registration of partnership form, and you email registration@rqia.org.uk to obtain portal logins for the additional partners.

One further terminology point, because it is the fastest way to reveal a recycled England document. Northern Ireland has no Nominated Individual. Regulation 8(2)(c)(i) of the 2007 Regulations requires an organisation to notify RQIA of the name, address and position of an individual, a director, manager, secretary or other officer, referred to in the Regulations as the responsible individual. Regulation 8(3) applies the fitness test to that person and regulation 8(4) bars undischarged bankrupts. The Minimum Standards call the same person the registered person, and the portal calls the role Responsible Person. All three labels describe one role.

Working through the service application

Page 1 captures the proposed service name, provider and service type from dropdowns, the sub-type, and the address and contact details. Every field is mandatory except the second address line.

Page 2 asks for a free-text description of the agency and the service opening date if you know it. RQIA states expressly that Maximum Number of Service Users and Categories of Care are not required for domiciliary care agencies. Do not helpfully invent a service user cap that you may then be conditioned on. There is also a field where you can propose conditions of your own.

Page 3 covers accommodation, facilities and services, questions 3.1 to 3.5, with a guidance document hyperlinked inside the page. Page 4 covers staff. Page 5 is a statement of financial viability for the agency. Page 6 is the documents list. Page 7 is the declaration.

Two mechanical details cause disproportionate trouble. Uploads are capped at 10MB per file at the time of writing, so check the current limit in the portal guidance; a scanned policy manual or a full-resolution photograph of a passport will fail against it, often without an obvious explanation. And the declaration must be opened, printed, signed by hand, scanned and uploaded before you can click Confirm and Proceed. On the manager application the declaration needs two signatures, the manager's and the responsible person's. An otherwise complete digital submission stalls on a missing wet signature more often than on anything substantive.

Note also that regulations 6 and 7 of the Registration Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2005 oblige you to tell RQIA about changes to the information you supplied, and about staff engaged, in the period after you apply but before the application is determined. Those duties bite during the very wait this article is about.

The documents you have to produce

The list below is assembled from Schedule 2 of the Registration Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2005, Schedule 2 of the 2007 Regulations, the Minimum Standards and RQIA's own portal guidance. Almost every item is a legal requirement rather than a preference.

The registered manager, and why Level 5 alone is not enough

Every agency must have a registered manager, registered with RQIA in their own right. Regulation 10 of the 2007 Regulations sets the fitness test: integrity and good character, the qualifications, skills and experience necessary to manage the agency having regard to its size, statement of purpose and the number and needs of service users, physical and mental fitness, and full and satisfactory Schedule 2 information.

Unlike England, Northern Ireland prescribes the qualification and experience combination exactly. There are two routes and no discretion to argue around them.

The standards describe relevant management experience broadly: a management post in a health and social care team or service, staff management, service supervision, caseload management, care management, resource management, student supervision or mentoring, and project management.

The transitional protections in the standards, for managers holding an NVQ 4 or holding no qualification at all, apply only to people who were already registered with RQIA at the relevant date. Section 3.1 of the F01 form exists for them. A new applicant cannot use it to sidestep the requirement.

The provider may be the manager, in which case that one individual must satisfy both the regulation 8 provider test and the regulation 10 manager test.

AccessNI, NISCC and the workforce

Northern Ireland uses AccessNI, not the DBS and not Disclosure Scotland. An England DBS certificate, including one on the DBS Update Service, is not usable for an RQIA application, and AccessNI has no equivalent update service, so checks are not portable between employers.

For the registration applicants, you do not apply independently. RQIA acts as the registered body. From the documents page in the portal you follow the link to nidirect, create an account if you need one, select an enhanced check through a registered body, and enter RQIA's PIN, which is given as 497850 in RQIA's applicant guidance updated in 2025. Treat the PIN shown inside your own portal as authoritative if the two ever differ. You upload photographic ID and proof of address, note your case reference, and pay the £32 AccessNI fee by BACS to RQIA (confirm the current figure on nidirect before you send), uploading a screenshot or remittance as proof. There is no card payment option.

nidirect publishes processing targets for enhanced checks of 70 per cent within 10 days, 95 per cent within 21 days and 98 per cent within 28 days, with an average issue time of 5 days, as at early September 2026. Check the current figures on nidirect before you plan around them. This item sits on the critical path more often than any other, so start it early.

Enhanced disclosures are required for every domiciliary care worker, not just the two registered individuals, and the agency obtains those through its own registered or umbrella body arrangements rather than RQIA's PIN. Free checks are available for genuine volunteers in non-profit organisations, with exceptions where the volunteering is for a government agency or a government-funded statutory service.

Then there is the register that has no England equivalent at all. Registration with the Northern Ireland Social Care Council is compulsory. Domiciliary care workers register as Social Care Practitioners and the manager of the service as a Social Care Manager. A worker entering social care for the first time must apply as soon as they take up the post and achieve registration within six months. Anyone with prior social care experience must be registered before starting a new post. Applications must be endorsed by someone at the employing organisation through their own NISCC account, so you need an employer account and a named endorser in place before you hire, not after.

If your proposed manager is nurse-qualified or an allied health professional rather than a social worker, confirm the NISCC position with NISCC directly. The Minimum Standards require registration with "the relevant regulatory body", which is not obviously NISCC for every route, while NISCC's own guidance says managers of domiciliary care services must register.

What it costs

This is the part every competing guide hedges on, and it does not need hedging. The fees are prescribed by the Regulation and Improvement Authority (Fees and Frequency of Inspections) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2005, as amended by S.R. 2007 No. 223 with effect from 30 April 2007. Domiciliary care agencies are named in that instrument and their fee is expressly set at nil. It is a positive statement in law, not an absence.

Two caveats. A nursing agency, if you intend to supply registered nurses, is a separate service type and is not free. And RQIA-collected payments go by BACS, with your name or service name in the narrative and proof uploaded to the portal; there is no card option. Check the current position on legislation.gov.uk and on NISCC's fees page before you build a budget on these figures.

How long it takes, the resubmission loop, and the fitness interview

RQIA does not publish a determination timescale. Its 2024-25 annual report records that internal audit found improvement in the development of registration KPIs and timescales, but the figures themselves are not public. One consultancy estimates 8 to 12 weeks for a well-prepared application, stretching to 3 to 6 months for a poor one. Treat that as a practitioner estimate, not a regulator figure, and plan against the clocks you can actually verify: the AccessNI turnaround, the 28-day representation and appeal windows, and your own document readiness.

What genuinely determines your timeline is the resubmission loop. RQIA assesses the application and supporting documents, contacts you if anything is missing, and writes directly to your two referees. If something is incomplete the team returns the application, you receive an automated email, and it reappears in the Applications to be Submitted or Resubmitted section for you to fix. That loop can run more than once, and it is the largest source of avoidable delay in the whole process.

The fitness interview, which everyone calls the fit person interview, has a statutory basis that is worth knowing. Regulation 5 of the Registration Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2005 requires the responsible person to attend an interview so that RQIA can determine whether the applicant is fit to carry on or manage the service. RQIA does not publish a question set or a format, so any list of "RQIA interview questions" you find online is inference.

What is published is the list of matters RQIA states it is assured on. For the registered person: knowledge and understanding of your legal responsibilities, an intention to run the agency in line with legislation and the Minimum Standards, an intention to undertake update training, and adherence to NISCC's Standards of Conduct and Practice for Employers of Social Care Workers. For the manager: knowledge of the legal responsibilities of the post, an intention to manage in line with legislation and standards, maintenance of professional registration, and knowledge of current health and social care services available in your area for the service user groups you will support.

That last item is the one that stops managers who trained in England. It is local knowledge. Which Health and Social Care Trust area you will operate in, what community services exist there, and how referrals and care management work locally. It cannot be revised from a national handbook. Expect the questions to be drawn from your own statement of purpose, operational policy, policy set and business plan, and expect any answer that contradicts your submitted documents to cost you weeks.

Refusal, representations and appeal

Under Article 14 of the 2003 Order, RQIA must grant the application if it is satisfied that the requirements of the regulations and any other relevant statutory provision are being and will continue to be complied with. The forward-looking limb matters: the decision is about whether the service you have described can operate compliantly from day one, not only about your history. RQIA may grant unconditionally or subject to conditions it thinks fit, and issues a certificate of registration on granting.

If RQIA proposes to refuse, or to attach conditions you have not agreed, it serves a notice of proposal. You then have 28 days from service to make written representations under Article 19, and RQIA cannot determine the matter until your representations arrive, you tell RQIA you will not be making any, or the 28 days expire. A notice of decision follows under Article 20, and you have a further 28 days from service of that notice to appeal to the Care Tribunal under Article 22. No appeal can be brought after that. The Care Tribunal in Northern Ireland, not the First-tier Tribunal, is the forum.

Most refusals never get that far, because most problems are caught in the return loop and fixed. But the two 28-day windows are hard deadlines, and they are the only firm timescales RQIA publishes anywhere in this process.

After the certificate arrives

The certificate goes on the wall of the agency premises. Failure to display it is an offence under Article 28 of the 2003 Order. Your service appears on RQIA's public register of services. There is no re-registration cycle and, as above, no annual fee.

Inspection frequency is prescribed, contrary to what most guides say. Regulation 6(5A) of the 2005 fees regulations, as amended in 2007, requires a domiciliary care agency to be inspected at least once in every twelve month period, defined as 1 April to 31 March. Crucially, no inspection is required in the twelve month period in which the agency is first registered. So your first inspection falls in your first full April to March year. RQIA's published inspection reports assess services against four domains: is care safe, is care effective, is care compassionate, and is the service well led. Findings come back as a report with a Quality Improvement Plan, returned through the portal.

Several obligations start immediately. Regulation 27 of the 2007 Regulations requires notice where the registered manager, or a provider managing personally, will be absent for 28 continuous days or more: no later than one month before a planned absence, within one week in an emergency, and within 7 days of returning. Statutory notifications go through the portal as Form 1a, 1b and 2. Regulation 23 replaces anything resembling an annual provider information return: you must run a system for evaluating service quality and, when RQIA asks, submit a report within one month of the request. And regulation 13 of the 2005 Registration Regulations creates a duty many providers have never heard of, to report to RQIA if it appears the agency is likely to cease to be financially viable within the next six months.

On the workforce side, NISCC registration is not a one-off. Social Care Practitioners hold a five year registration period and Social Care Managers and social workers a three year one, and every registrant must complete 90 hours of Post Registration Training and Learning within their period and confirm it at renewal. Standard 12.6 puts the onus on you to make that possible. Note too that once you have eleven or more employees working sixteen hours a week or more, the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998 requires you to register with the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, monitor your workforce and submit an annual return. Check the current thresholds with the Commission; there is no equivalent duty in the rest of the UK.

Two final points on content. Your policies must reference the 2007 Regulations and the Minimum Standards, never CQC fundamental standards or the Care Act 2014, and your safeguarding policy must sit inside the Northern Ireland framework, Adult Safeguarding: Prevention and Protection in Partnership (2015) and the associated operational procedures, with referrals to the relevant Trust's Adult Protection Gateway Service. Be aware also that the Minimum Standards themselves cite superseded material, including the Data Protection Act 1998 and bodies that no longer exist, so do not copy their references wholesale into your own documents. And registration alone does not win you hours: domiciliary care is commissioned by the five Health and Social Care Trusts, and getting onto a Trust framework is a separate exercise from getting registered.

If it helps, this is roughly where software starts earning its place. homecareOS ships with a UK care policy library written per nation, so a Northern Ireland agency is not editing England templates, along with the AccessNI and NISCC expiry tracking, notification records and audit trail an RQIA inspector will ask for in that first full year. If you want to see how the four regulators line up against one another before you commit, our four-nation compliance comparison sets them side by side. The licence itself is charged per carer. Office staff and service users do not count towards it, 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. Current rates are on the pricing page. If you would rather talk the registration route through with someone first, that is what the advisory practice is for.