The number and share of elderly people in the total population is increasing, especially those over 80 years old. Due to increasingly demanding users with changed habits (desire for accommodation and care in city centers with all available facilities, higher technological literacy, need for greater involvement in decisions of the public and political life of people of the third age, motivation for work activity even after entering retirement), long-term care of the elderly is a current topic of European social and health policies. Members of the European Union (EU) strive to ensure a sufficient number of infrastructural care facilities for the elderly and infirm, increase the number of professional staff, develop alternative forms of care and decentralize existing care to less developed regions. New generations of users express a desire for a different approach to care, namely care provided in their own environment (home care) with constant supervision by professionally engaged staff. In addition to the pressure on public finances, EU member states face the problem of insufficient labor force, especially in the provision of home care (mostly within the formal type), which they compensate for migrants from third countries. However, insufficient education of migrants impairs the quality of formal services provided in home care. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2021) states that formal care is the only and exclusive form of home care. However, numerous authors of scientific papers also include informal care as a form of home care (Ilinca et al., 2017; Rodrigues et al., 2017). It is considered that informal care is the most widespread form of long-term care, so with this in mind, careful consideration of the distribution of such services to elderly users is required (OECD, 2021). Long-term care is divided into formal and informal. Formal home care is provided by educated/trained staff (more often than not, low-educated caregivers or, less often, nurses). Informal care is most often carried out by members of the immediate family and is also the biggest challenge of long-term care. With great pressure on family members sacrificing their working hours and health, informal care is often the only choice of care available in many less developed parts of the EU. In addition to income, which is the basic prerequisite for the use of home care, cultural and legal norms determine the preference for formal or informal forms of home care. The implementation of home care varies significantly between EU countries. In the implementation of home care, the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe are characterized by the traditional family narrative of service, in which, partly due to legal obligation, partly due to custom, the care of the elderly user of the household is transferred to family members (most often women - wives or children). On the other hand, the countries of northern Europe - due to generous public benefits - have greater opportunities to use educated, engaged staff in the implementation of home care, which transfers the "majority" burden of family care to a third person. Probably the most "humane" approach in home care is the combination of both types of care (formal and informal), which dominates in Central European countries. However, considering the availability of formal and informal home care conditioned by socioeconomic circumstances (sufficient number of caregivers, the possibility of choosing different care options, the organization of the formal care system in rural areas), the question of fair use of these services arises. Some users are already limited in the possibilities of using home care, given their living environment. In addition, the use of each of the home care services (formal and informal type) also requires the participation of the user's private income, which, considering the level of payment power of the user, makes it (not) possible to use a particular service. In addition to income and living environment (urban/rural environment), other factors such as health status, household composition, number of children and level of education can be associated with the form of home care service. It is considered that better-educated users have higher disposable income and a wider spectrum of available information, and that they think about the possibilities of using long-term care and ways of financing it at an earlier stage. The dissertation therefore identifies the representation of formal and informal home care among the elderly population and investigates whether there is horizontal inequality and vertical inequity in the use of these types of services. The obtained information could be useful to national policy makers in the organization of a fair distribution system of home care through a horizontal (persons with the same health condition use the same level of care) and vertical approach (persons with a different health condition use a different type and level of care). The paper uses data from the 8th and 9th waves of the SHARE study - Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe - SHARE, which were collected during 2019/2020. and 2021/2022. in 27 European countries. The working sample includes persons who were aged 65 or older at the time of the individual wave of research. The results show the representation of formal and informal care in favor of poor users in the analyzed countries. Education shows that all countries have a partial concentration index in the direction of the rich (pro-rich), which can be expressed that more educated people experience less inequality. Education and income are positively correlated, meaning that highly educated people enjoy better incomes. After taking into account needs factors, inequalities in formal care disappeared for most countries, while inequalities in informal care remained much larger for most countries, mostly with a pro-poor orientation.