PCA can mean personal care attendant, personal care assistant, or personal care aide. The letters travel well. The job title does not. One state says attendant care. Another says personal assistance. Another bills a service called personal care and lets the worker's job title say something else.
The core of the work is help with activities of daily living: bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, and moving around. It can include related household tasks when the service definition allows them. Personal care is a common home and community-based service. It is also common in aging and physical-disability programs, so a PCA is not automatically a disability-services worker.
In many waivers, personal care and habilitation are different services. Personal care helps a person do a task. Habilitation is aimed at building a skill so the person can do more of it. A direct support professional often does both in the same shift. The plan, not the worker's preference, is what the agency is supposed to bill.
Self-direction uses the PCA title constantly. The person or their representative hires an attendant, and a financial management service pays them. That attendant may be a relative, if the waiver allows it. They may not be called a DSP at all, even when the day looks like direct support.
When a wage law says personal care aide and a disability agency says DSP, do not assume the checks are the same. Read the service definition and the employer. The tasks overlap. The Medicaid service, the training rule, and the wage floor may not.
The letters also show up in job ads aimed at people with no disability-services background. Home-care agencies, aging waivers, and I/DD self-direction all recruit PCAs. The ad's employer, and the Medicaid program named in the posting, tell you which rulebook the shift uses.