Choosing a Nursing Home for Someone You Love?
Don't stop at the star rating. See the full inspection history, fines, and complaints - explained in plain English.
Don't stop at the star rating. See the full inspection history, fines, and complaints - explained in plain English.
Every CMS-certified nursing home in the country is listed. Narrow by state, then city or use Nearby to find homes around your current location.
Isolate facilities by fines, deficiencies, or complaints. Narrow by rating. Filter by ownership type. Switch states and your filters carry over.
See its overall star rating, health inspection and staffing ratings, address, county, ownership type, and count of complaint-triggered citations at a glance.
Each survey type (Health, Health (Complaints), Fines) is one credit to unlock. Once unlocked, it stays free to revisit on your account - forever.
Plain english deficiency details help guide you in your choice. Includes how often a deficiency occured and on which date.
Select Print and Facility details including bar graphs on Health, Health (Complaints) and Fines tab are organized in the browser print preview. Save to PDF or Print for future comparison.
When you unlock a Health, Health (Complaints) or Fines tab we save that Facility. Select My Unlocked Facilities to view and compare each with a simple click.
Data sourced from the CMS Provider Data Catalog
A visual tour of the insights waiting inside the data.
Across 14,600 CMS-certified nursing homes, the average overall rating is 2.98 out of 5 - barely above the midpoint of 2.5. That's not a verdict on any single facility, but it is a signal: "average" care still comes with citations, complaints, and fines. For the home you're actually considering, you have to look at its own record.
Most nursing homes have citations on record. What separates them is which problems regulators fined them for - 3,000 citations escalated into fines, while 2,900 were recorded as a single formal notice without the same financial penalty. When you're comparing facilities, the fine count is the number that tells you how badly things actually went wrong.
Nursing homes are run by ten different organizations. The two largest are both for-profit - LLCs (5,200) and for-profit corporations (4,600) - with non-profit corporations a distant third at 2,300. That matters because, on average, for-profit facilities carry more citations and more fines than non-profit and government-run ones.
CMS rates nearly every nursing home 1 to 5 stars, and the numbers are almost perfectly even - about 3,000 homes at 1 star, 2,900 at 5, 2,900 at 2, 2,800 at 3, 2,700 at 4. Only 127 go unrated. That evenness is the point: there are as many one-star facilities as five-star ones, so the rating is telling you something real.
New York appears on every list - best-rated, worst-rated, and most-fined. Pennsylvania and New Jersey show up on both the best and worst sides. Missouri and Illinois only appear on fines. The pattern: states with the most nursing homes tend to have both the best and the worst, so the state alone won't tell you what you're getting. You still have to look at the individual home.
Pulled directly from the CMS Provider Data Catalog
New accounts get 6 free credits - no card required
Every section you unlock stays free to revisit
Every severity code explained in a full sentence
Everything you might want to know before you start searching.
One credit pool, spent on any citation section on any facility. Credits never expire.
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Browse the full directory by state, or jump straight into the interactive search tool to filter by fines, deficiencies, complaints, ratings, and ownership.
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