Peterborough holds a title worth building a business on: on the July 2025 estimates it is tied for the oldest metro in Ontario by senior share, 23.6 percent, and fourth in the country, with an 85-plus share that sat in the top national tier at the last census. It is also, by the same national statistics, one of the thinnest home care markets measured: nine employer locations, a count that has moved by exactly one since 2022. Ontario's oldest metro runs its home care on nine agencies, and the demand curve in front of them says the 75-plus population grows 62 percent by 2040. Most cities' care gaps are behind them, already absorbed as strain. Peterborough's is almost entirely still to come.
Old at the top, young at the bottom
The depth of the senior base is easy to understate. Beyond the headline share, 43.3 percent of the metro's 85-plus who live in private homes live alone, and among women 85 and over it is 54.1 percent, the highest live-alone concentration in any market this series has covered. And unlike almost every Ontario city that claims it, Peterborough has genuine retirement in-migration: net arrivals of seniors from elsewhere in Ontario have been positive every year on record since 2018, around 200 a year, with a matching stream of pre-retirees buying their way onto the lakes ahead of schedule. Metronomic, not dramatic, and compounding. The town they arrive into is already organized around age: 28.5 percent of the metro's households are one person, the regional hospital is the area's largest employer, and Peterborough has run a formal age-friendly network of some two hundred organizations, advising the city, the county and the Curve Lake and Hiawatha First Nations councils, since 2017.
At the same time the town has gotten younger on paper, the median age dropping from 44.4 to 41.0 in four years as Trent University and Fleming College drew a surge of students. For a home care operator this is the good kind of paradox: an aging client base and a growing young labour pool in the same small city. Fleming runs its PSW certificate three intakes a year at the Sutherland campus with about 300 clinical hours, in a town whose care-training pipeline dates to 1973, when the college absorbed both hospitals' nursing schools. The wage floor is real, though: home support workers in the Muskoka-Kawarthas region earned a median of $23.07 an hour on the 2024 reference data, above the provincial median, and facility work paid about $2.65 more still, the standing recruitment headwind every home care agency here works against.
The radius is the roster
Peterborough's geography splits its market in two. The city holds 65 percent of the people on 4.3 percent of the land, and the oldest-old concentrate there, four percent of city residents already 85 or over. Everyone else lives out along the water: Selwyn, the retirement heartland through Lakefield and Bridgenorth, is 28.7 percent seniors with a median age of 52 and still growing; Douro-Dummer runs at 16.6 people per square kilometre with nearly one in five dwellings seasonal; and the townships are growing two to four times faster than the city, which means the client base is decentralizing toward the lakes year by year. Yet all nine home care employers effectively operate from the city. Every township client is a radius decision, made over 151 centimetres of annual snow, a hundred days of snow cover, and seventeen nights a year below minus twenty.
That is the operating problem Carelyst was shaped for. Mr. Latimer, 88, lives alone outside Lakefield, one of Selwyn's many; his morning visit is the second stop on a caregiver's lake loop that the schedule plans as a loop, with the driving recorded as payable travel entries, minutes and kilometres, that flow into payroll instead of vanishing into goodwill. When the January intake call asks whether the agency can take a third client further up at Buckhorn, the caregiver search answers with an availability percentage against those exact mornings, drive-heavy Tuesdays and all, before anyone promises anything. At the door, the GPS-verified punch is the only witness a lakeside visit has, and it is the record his daughter in Toronto reads that evening in the family portal, arrival, departure, tasks done. On the mornings the township roads lose to the snow, absences fall into the fill queue in one step and offers reach whoever can actually get there.
Nine agencies, and a hospital pointing home
The public system around this market is quietly aligned with it. Ontario Health atHome's Central East area, which includes Peterborough, was mid-pack as of July 31, 2026, with 94.2 percent of nursing and 92.5 percent of complex personal-support patients starting within five days. More telling is what the regional hospital just built: Peterborough Regional Health Centre, a 500-bed, $435-million operation serving more than 300,000 people, opened a Reactivation Care Centre in December 2024, a 12-bed transitional unit designed around seniors who no longer need acute care and are preparing to go home, run under a director whose title includes transitional care and seniors' health. The system's direction of travel is home, in the metro where the Ministry of Finance projects the 85-plus population of the county nearly tripling by 2051, past 10,000 around 2040.
Nine agencies, the oldest client base in Ontario, a radius full of lakes, and a wave that has barely started. If you run a home care agency in Peterborough or the Kawarthas, or you can see the opening, try Carelyst free for 14 days, and build the roster the radius requires.
Frequently asked questions
By senior share, yes, in a statistical tie. On Statistics Canada's July 2025 estimates, 23.6 percent of the Peterborough metro is 65 or over, tied with Belleville-Quinte West for the highest share of any Ontario metro and fourth in Canada, behind only Trois-Rivières, Saguenay and Nanaimo. Its 85-plus share of 3.4 percent in the 2021 Census sat in the top national tier, tied with Trois-Rivières. One caveat belongs beside those numbers: the metro's median age fell from 44.4 to 41.0 between 2021 and 2025 on a surge of college and university students, so the town is old at the top and newly young at the bottom at the same time.
Yes, and Peterborough is the rare Ontario market where the census shows it. Net migration of people 65 and over from elsewhere in Ontario has been positive every single year on record since 2018-19, running between 183 and 323 people a year, with a similar-sized stream of 55-to-64 pre-retirees alongside. It is a steady trickle rather than a flood, roughly 200 net seniors a year, arriving against a backdrop of about 1,700 deaths a year, which is why the senior base keeps deepening even as the metro grows.
Nine employer locations at Statistics Canada's December 2025 business count, essentially unchanged since 2022, which works out to about 2.55 per 10,000 seniors, among the lowest ratios of any metro measured. The market's shape is unusual: there is no swarm of tiny agencies, five of the nine locations employ 50 or more people, and seven of the nine sit inside the city itself, with no registered home care employer based out in the townships. The counts cover employer locations only, so owner-operators without payroll are not included.
It looks like driving. The City of Peterborough holds 65 percent of the metro's people on 4.3 percent of its land; the rest live across roughly 1,440 square kilometres of townships and lakeshore, where Selwyn is 28.7 percent seniors with a median age of 52 and nearly one in five Douro-Dummer dwellings had no usual residents on census day, the census's cottage proxy. Add 151 centimetres of snow a year and about 100 days with snow on the ground, and the travel between visits is as much a part of the schedule as the visits themselves.
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