OBJECTIVES: Financial burden of diseases are often not limited to the healthcare sector but often cause a spill-over-effect to the patient’s family. Opportunity costs incurred to the family can be attributed to the caregiving burden. The EU-funded H2020 ProgrammE in Costing, resource use measurement and outcome valuation for Use in multi-sectoral National and International health economic evaluAtions (PECUNIA; grant agreement No 779292) aims to harmonize the cross-sectoral and cross-country unit cost development and calculate standardized unit costs for selected services in several countries. The objective of this study was to establish harmonized unit cost for informal care time and to compare unit costs on country-level.

METHODS: PECUNIA MsExcel costing template for the valuation of informal care time was developed by the PECUNIA consortium. Following a scoping review, the proxy good method was selected for valuing voluntary time. The template was designed to collect basic information on the unit cost (reference year, country and currency) and collect hourly rates of different market providers for personal care. Five countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherland and Spain) applied this template to calculate national unit costs for informal care time. All unit costs were reported in Euro for 2019.

RESULTS: Unit cost for informal care time in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Spain and the Netherland were estimated at 14.07, 27.33, 6.94, 7.43 and 17.79 Euro/hour, respectively. A positive, but insignificant correlation was observed between unit costs and countries’ per capita GDP (R= 0.69, p=0.194).

CONCLUSIONS: This the first multi-country study on the development of unit costs for informal care time based on an internationally harmonized unit cost tool. Next, unit cost estimates will be validated externally. Furthermore, the unit costs may be used together with the PECUNIA resource-use measurement (RUM) instrument advancing RUM and cost valuation in future economic evaluations based on two aligned tools.