Why this site exists
The federal government already inspects every nursing home in America and publishes what it finds. It publishes it in a form almost nobody can use.
What we do
We take the records Medicare already collects on all 14,690 certified nursing homes and write them in plain English, without softening them and without making them worse than they are.
We do not rank homes ourselves
There is no Nursing Homes Compared score. We show you Medicare's rating, explain honestly what it does and does not measure, and put the underlying findings next to it.
We publish the government's own wording
Next to every plain-English rewrite sits the description Medicare recorded. You should be able to check us against the record without leaving the page.
We take no money from nursing homes
No home can pay to change what its page says, to be featured, or to be removed. There is no advertising from any facility or operator on this site.
We say when we do not know
Some homes report no staffing data. Some have no rating. Some have a rating Medicare is withholding. Those are three different things and we label them as three different things rather than showing a blank.
What this site is not
Worth being blunt about.
Nursing Homes Compared is independent. It is not part of Medicare, CMS, HHS or any government agency, it is not endorsed by them, and it is not affiliated with any nursing home, chain or operator.
It is a record of what federal inspectors found and when. Deciding what that means for your family is your decision to make, with people who know your situation.
An inspector sees one day of a home's year. Read the record, write down what worries you, and then go and ask about it in person.
Where the data comes from
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes a new release each month. We load five files from it: provider information, health deficiencies, penalties, ownership and state averages. This site was built from the release dated August 1, 2026, which contains 419,479 inspection findings across 14,690 homes.
A refresh runs against a staging copy first and is only published if the row counts, the facility identifiers and the core columns all check out. If a CMS file arrives truncated, the site keeps serving the previous month rather than showing you something wrong.
If you believe something on this site is inaccurate, we want to know. Corrections to the underlying record have to go through CMS, but if we have misread or mislabeled what CMS published, that is ours to fix.