Allentown Senior AdvisorHow much staff time must a Pennsylvania personal care home provide?
55 Pa. Code 2600.57 requires at least one hour of personal care services a day for each mobile resident and two hours for each resident with mobility needs, with at least 75% of those hours available during waking hours.
That is a floor computed across the whole home, not a promise of one-on-one time. A home with 40 mobile and 20 less-mobile residents, for example, needs at least 80 hours of direct care a day, about 60 of them while residents are awake. Ask the home how many direct care staff are on each shift and how the overnight shift is covered.
What training does a personal care home administrator need?
An administrator must complete a 100-hour Department-approved administrator training course and pass a competency test under 2600.64, with annual continuing training; ALR administrators also need dementia-specific training on top of the 100 hours (2800.64).
Ask how long the current administrator has been in the role. Turnover at the top often shows up later as citations for paperwork, training records and medication systems.
What training do direct care workers need?
Every direct care worker in a personal care home needs orientation before working alone and at least 12 hours of annual training, and workers who give medications must complete DHS's medication administration course; secured dementia units add six hours of dementia training a year.
Staff-training sections are among the citations we see regularly in Lehigh Valley inspection reports, usually for missing documentation. Ask how the home tracks each worker's hours, and who teaches the medication course.
Does an assisted living residence need a nurse?
Yes: an assisted living residence must have a licensed nurse available in the building or on call and a dietitian on staff or under contract, but it does not need a medical director or a director of nursing, and a personal care home needs neither nurse nor dietitian.
Many Lehigh Valley personal care homes employ a nurse anyway, often as a wellness or resident care director. Ask what that nurse's hours are, and whether a nurse is reachable at night.
How do I check a home's staffing in practice?
Ask for the staffing schedule for a typical week, compare it with the home's resident count and mix, visit once at mealtime and once in the evening, and read the latest DHS inspection summary for staffing or training citations.
Nursing homes report staffing hours to CMS, and our nursing home pages show them; personal care homes do not, so your own questions and observations matter more. In Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties, DHS's provider directory lists 68 licensed personal care homes and 2 assisted living residences, with 5,255 licensed resident places between them (retrieved November 6, 2026).
At a glance
| Pennsylvania staffing rules require | Pennsylvania staffing rules do not require | |
|---|---|---|
| Care time | 1 to 2 hours of personal care per resident per day | A fixed ratio on every shift |
| Training | 100-hour administrator course; 12 hours a year for direct care | A licensed nurse in every personal care home |
| ALR | A nurse on call and a dietitian | A medical director |
Sources include 55 Pa. Code Chapters 20, 2600 and 2800, Pennsylvania DHS, Department of Health and Department of Aging pages, CMS, VA and CareScout rate tables as cited above; see our editorial standards.
