By Indy Senior Advisor Care Team · August 14, 2026
Hendricks County's senior living communities cluster in Avon and Plainfield, near the Marion County line. The county's transportation, respite care, and in-home help run out of Danville, twenty minutes west. Families keep finding one and missing the other.
The Shape of the County Decides More Than People Expect
Hendricks County had 174,788 residents at the 2020 census, and it has kept growing since. Almost all of that growth has happened on the eastern edge, where Avon, Plainfield and Brownsburg press up against the Marion County line along US 36, I-70 and Ronald Reagan Parkway. Drive fifteen minutes west of Danville and the subdivisions stop. Pittsboro, Lizton, Clayton, Amo, Coatesville, North Salem and Stilesville are small towns surrounded by farmland.
That split matters when a parent starts needing help, because senior care in Hendricks County did not distribute itself evenly across the county. It followed the rooftops. The communities went where the population went, which is east. The county's public support services stayed where the county government is, which is Danville, in the middle.
So a family in Brownsburg and a family in Coatesville are solving different problems even though they live in the same county and pay taxes to the same government. The Brownsburg family has choices within a ten-minute drive and a traffic problem. The Coatesville family has a thirty-minute drive to almost everything and no traffic at all.
One caution on the numbers you will see quoted about these towns. Plainfield's 2020 population of 34,625 includes the residents of two state correctional facilities counted as group quarters, which is several thousand people. It is a real number, but it is not several thousand more potential neighbors at the senior center. Population rankings between these towns are closer than they look.
Where the Communities Actually Are
Our verified directory currently lists eight senior living communities in Hendricks County. Four are in Avon, three are in Plainfield, and one is in Danville. You can see all of them on our Hendricks County page, or by town on the Avon and Plainfield pages.
Be honest with yourself about what that list is. It is every Hendricks County community we have verified against the operator's own website, which is the bar we hold ourselves to. It is not a census of the county's market. Brownsburg in particular has senior living we have not yet added, and we would rather say that plainly than let a gap in our directory read like a gap in the town.
The practical read on the eight we do list: the Avon and Plainfield cluster gives you actual side-by-side comparison shopping. You can tour three communities in an afternoon without leaving a five-mile radius, which is genuinely useful, because comparing two communities is much easier when you have seen them the same week.
Danville and the western half of the county do not give you that. If your mother has lived in Coatesville for fifty years and wants to stay near her church, you are choosing between one nearby option and a twenty-five-minute move east. That is a real decision with a real cost on both sides, and it deserves more thought than a search result gives it.
Two Hospital Systems, Two Different Discharges
Hendricks County is served by two hospitals that belong to entirely different organizations, and which one your parent lands in shapes what happens next.
Hendricks Regional Health is an independent hospital system headquartered in the county. Its main campus is the Danville Hospital at 1000 East Main Street in Danville, general information (317) 745-4451, and it operates a second hospital in Brownsburg along with medical centers in Avon and Plainfield and immediate care in Avon, Brownsburg and Plainfield. Its discharge planning function is listed on its own site as Transitions of Care, in Building 2 at 112 Hospital Lane on the Danville campus. Hendricks Regional also lists palliative care and rehabilitation therapy among its Danville services.
IU Health West Hospital sits at 1111 North Ronald Reagan Parkway in Avon, phone (317) 217-3000, and is part of the statewide IU Health system. A discharge from IU Health West plugs into IU Health's own referral network and case management, which behaves differently from an independent county hospital's.
The practical difference is who the discharge planner already knows. An independent system's case managers have worked with the same handful of Hendricks County agencies for years and can often name them without looking. A large system's case managers work from a broader network that may point you toward Indianapolis. Neither is wrong. But if you want your parent to stay in the county, say that out loud to the case manager on day one rather than day three. Our guide to discharge planning at the metro's major health systems covers how those conversations tend to go.
The Agency Most Hendricks Families Have Never Called
Hendricks County Senior Services sits at 1201 Sycamore Lane in Danville, phone (317) 745-4303, open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has been operating in the county since 1977, and its 15,200 square foot building holds both the agency offices and the county senior center.
What matters to a caregiver is the in-home side. HCSS provides respite services, where an attendant comes to the house so the family caregiver can leave, and attendant services covering bathing, dressing, grooming, mobility help, medication reminders, meal preparation, light housekeeping, laundry and escort to medical appointments. Per the agency's own site, a limited number of grants are available to help caregivers who cannot afford respite.
Two details worth knowing before you call. First, HCSS accepts Medicaid waiver payment under the PathWays program through Anthem, Humana and UnitedHealthcare, which are the managed care plans running Indiana PathWays for Aging. If your parent is already on PathWays, this is a local provider that can be paid by the plan. Second, the agency states it is not accepting new homemaker clients at this time. Respite and attendant services are separate and are still available, but do not assume the housekeeping-only service is on the table.
HCSS also runs a food pantry, a mobility equipment loaning closet, and a personal emergency monitoring service. The loaning closet is the one families are most surprised by. A walker or a shower chair borrowed for six weeks after a hospital stay is a small thing that quietly prevents a fall.
LINK, and Why Transportation Decides More Than It Should
HCSS is the operations manager for LINK Hendricks County, the county's rural public transit system, run in partnership with Sycamore Services. LINK is demand-response, meaning you reserve a ride rather than catch a bus at a stop. You schedule it by calling (317) 718-4474.
The operating details are the whole story here. Curb-to-curb and door-to-door service runs Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Rides are first come, first served, and the agency asks for 48 hours notice, with reservations accepted up to five weeks out. There is no weekend service, no holiday service, and no service when weather makes boarding or travel unsafe.
Fares are $6 per leg for a trip within a town and $8 per leg for a trip within the county. Seniors 60 and older traveling to life-essential destinations, which the agency lists as medical appointments, grocery shopping, legal, social service, financial and nutrition-site trips, ride on a donation basis instead. Note that a round trip is two legs, and that the donation basis is not the same thing as free, though in practice it removes the fare as a barrier.
Read those rules against a real week. A Tuesday cardiology appointment in Danville works. A Saturday family lunch does not. A 7 p.m. discharge from the Avon hospital does not. And an icy February morning may not, which is one of the quiet reasons winter is when central Indiana families finally make the call. If your parent has stopped driving and lives alone in the western half of the county, transportation is not a logistics footnote. It is the constraint that decides whether staying home is actually working.
CICOA Is Still the Door for Waivers
Hendricks County does not have its own Area Agency on Aging. It is part of Indiana's Planning and Service Area 8, served by CICOA Aging & In-Home Solutions, which also covers Marion, Hamilton, Johnson, Boone, Hancock, Morgan and Shelby counties. CICOA's Resource Center is (317) 803-6131, with a toll-free line at (800) 432-2422.
The distinction that trips people up: HCSS is a local provider of services, and CICOA is the agency that coordinates access to Medicaid waiver funding and PathWays case management for this region. They work together, and HCSS lists CICOA among its funders. But if your question is whether your parent qualifies for a waiver, CICOA is the call. If your question is who can send someone to the house next Tuesday, HCSS is the call.
Before waiver dollars flow, your parent needs a level of care determination, and Indiana changed who performs that assessment. If your family has not been through this before, read who now handles the level of care assessment in Indiana so you are not calling the wrong office for three weeks.
One more Indiana-specific thing to keep straight. The PathWays Waiver pays for care services, including services delivered inside a licensed residential care facility. It does not pay room and board. Room-and-board assistance in a facility runs through the separate Residential Care Assistance Program, and a community may hold an agreement for one, both, or neither. Ask each Hendricks County community which agreements they actually hold, by name, and get the answer in writing.
What It Costs, and What Nobody Publishes
There is no published cost figure for senior care in Hendricks County. CareScout, which runs the survey most people are quoting when they cite a number, publishes state medians only. Anyone showing you an Avon-specific or Plainfield-specific median has produced it from somewhere other than a primary source.
The Indiana figures from the 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey are a private one-bedroom in assisted living at $5,639 a month, a semi-private nursing home room at $8,943, a private nursing home room at $10,326, and non-medical home care at $35 an hour. Use those as an order-of-magnitude check on the quotes you receive, not as a prediction of what a specific Hendricks County community will charge you.
There is also no published memory care median anywhere in the country, for Indiana or any other state, because it is not a category CareScout surveys. If a source quotes you one, it was estimated. Get written quotes from the communities themselves and compare them to each other.
Do the home care arithmetic before you assume staying home is the cheaper path. At $35 an hour, forty hours a week runs roughly $6,067 a month before any overtime or holiday differential, which is already above the state assisted living median. Our breakdown of the real math on in-home care walks through where the crossover usually lands, and the costs overview covers how families actually assemble the money.
A Workable First Week in Hendricks County
If you are starting from zero, this sequence wastes the least time. Call CICOA's Resource Center at (317) 803-6131 first and ask about the level of care assessment and waiver eligibility, because that clock is the longest one and you want it running. Then call HCSS at (317) 745-4303 about respite or attendant hours and the equipment loaning closet, which can stabilize the next few weeks while the waiver question is unresolved.
If transportation is part of the problem, call LINK at (317) 718-4474 and book something two days out just to see how the reservation process works before you need it in an emergency. Learning the system on a routine grocery trip is far better than learning it the morning of a discharge.
Then tour. Book three communities in the Avon and Plainfield corridor in a single week so the comparison is fresh, and ask each one the same short set of questions: which waiver and RCAP agreements they hold, what triggers a level-of-care rate increase, what the written dementia disclosure says, and what notice they must give to move a resident out. Our questions section covers what those answers should sound like.
And decide the geography question deliberately rather than by default. Staying in the western half of the county keeps a parent near their church, their neighbors and their doctor, at the cost of fewer options and a longer drive for you. Moving east reverses it. Families who talk about that trade openly, early, tend to be happier with where they land than families who let a hospital discharge decide it for them in forty-eight hours. If you want help sorting through it, reach out.
