Inspection findings
Government inspectors visit every home and write up what they find. We show you which findings were serious, and how rare that is.
Learn moreReal information. Better decisions.
Choosing a nursing home should never feel like a guess. We take the records the federal government already collects and explain what they actually mean, so you can judge a place before you walk in the door.
Built on records that already exist
Where the numbers come from
Every number here comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We do not collect our own. Where we rank or summarize, we show the CMS figure next to it so you can check the working.
14,690
nursing homes, every one certified by Medicare
419,479
inspection findings on record
1,426
homes carrying Medicare's abuse icon right now, a narrower count than the full abuse citation record
What we help you evaluate
Six things that tell you more about a nursing home than a star rating does.
Staffing
How much nursing care a resident needs depends on how sick they are. We compare each home against what researchers expect for residents that sick.
Learn moreFines
What Medicare has fined the home over roughly the last three years, and whether it was barred from taking new residents in that time.
Learn moreAbuse citations
Medicare marks some homes with a small abuse icon on its own site. That icon is narrower and more recent than a home's full record of abuse findings. We say which one we are showing.
Learn moreOwnership
Whether a home is run for profit, by a non-profit or by a government body. Medicare records who owns each home, and we load that file, but the owner and chain pages are not built yet and nothing on this site claims to show them.
Learn moreThe watch list
Medicare runs a Special Focus Facility program for homes with a persistent record of poor care, and withholds their star rating while they are on it. We name those homes, and the ones lined up for the list.
Learn moreA home can hold five stars while providing a third less nursing care than researchers expect for residents as sick as its own. The rating will not tell you that.
Medicare grades homes on a curve inside each state, so a star does not mean the same thing everywhere. A home picks up penalty points for every inspection finding, more points for the serious ones, and fewer points are better. In this release, the worst score that still earned five stars on inspections was 3 points in Alabama. In New Mexico it was 61.
Start with your town
Type a town, a ZIP code, or the name of a home. You will see what inspectors found there, how it is staffed, and what it has been fined.
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