Terms of use

Effective date: September 3, 2026

Published by: NUVION LLC, which operates this site as Nursing Homes Compared

What this site is

Nursing Homes Compared publishes what federal inspectors found in every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States, written in plain English.

The figures come from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which publishes them free to the public. We load five of the CMS Provider Data Catalog files: Provider Information, Health Deficiencies, Penalties, Ownership, and State US Averages. We rewrite what they say so a family can read it, and we print CMS's own wording next to our rewrite so you can check us without leaving the page.

Using this site means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

We are not the government, and we are not a nursing home

The footer of every page on this site says:

This site is an independent informational resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Medicare, CMS, HHS, or any government agency, and it is not affiliated with any nursing home, facility, or provider.

That is exact and these terms do not soften it. We are not part of Medicare, CMS, HHS, or any government body. No government agency has reviewed, approved, or endorsed this site. We are not owned by, paid by, or connected to any nursing home, chain, or operator.

The data is CMS's, and it is a snapshot

We do not create any of the underlying figures. Every inspection finding, fine, payment denial, star rating and staffing hour on this site came from a CMS file. If a figure is wrong in CMS's file, it is wrong here, because we publish what CMS published.

The data is a snapshot, not a live feed. CMS publishes a new set of files once a month, on the last Wednesday. Every page on this site says which release it was built from and the day we loaded it, in the footer, and a facility page says it again in the section under the findings. Read both dates. The release date is when CMS published. The loaded date is when we picked it up, and it can be days or weeks later. Between releases the site does not change, even if the home does.

We reload after each monthly release. How long that takes varies, so the footer of every page prints both the date CMS published and the date we loaded it, and those two dates are the honest answer rather than a promise about speed.

A finding describes a moment that has passed. An inspector saw one day of a home's year, and that day may have been years ago. A home may have fixed the problem the week after. A home with a clean record may have a problem nobody has inspected yet. Read the dates.

Ratings are ranks, not scores. Medicare grades health inspections on a curve inside each state, so the same record can earn five stars in one state and three in another. Every rating on this site says which state it is measured against. Do not compare a star across a state line.

Our plain-English line describes a rule, not an incident. Under every finding we print one short sentence in our own words. That sentence says what rule the inspector cited. It is not an account of what happened, it does not say who was involved, and it does not say how bad it was beyond the severity letter CMS gave it. Medicare's own wording of the same rule is printed directly beneath ours so you can compare the two. The inspector's written report is the record of the incident, and it is not on this site.

Sometimes CMS marks its own figure. CMS attaches footnotes to some staffing figures, meaning the number should be read with care. Where a home filed a staffing figure that cannot be true, we say so and show nothing instead.

Where CMS has attached one of those notes, the page says so and prints the note number. CMS does not publish what its staffing note numbers mean, so we tell you a note exists and that we cannot tell you why. 790 homes carry one, and 354 of them are homes whose hours we still show.

Some of our numbers are worked out, not reported. Where we show the level of nursing care a home's residents would be expected to need, that is not a Medicare figure and not a legal requirement. We calculate it from the home's own Medicare case-mix score using a published research formula. We say so on every page it appears on. It is a research benchmark.

Some things are missing on purpose. Some homes report no staffing data. Some have no rating, usually because Medicare does not yet have enough inspection history to give them one. Some have a rating Medicare is withholding, which is what happens to every home on the federal watch list. Those are three different situations and we label them as three different situations rather than showing a blank.

A fine total is a window, not a lifetime. The federal penalties file covers roughly the last three years. When a page shows what a home has been fined, that is what is in the file we loaded. It is not everything the home has ever been fined. Fines can also be appealed and reduced after CMS publishes the figure.

Some findings are being formally disputed. CMS lets a home contest a finding, and its file marks the ones that are under dispute. Where CMS marks a finding as being contested, the page says so beside that finding. In the release we loaded, 646 findings are marked under Informal Dispute Resolution and 159 under Independent Informal Dispute Resolution, and 294 of those are at the actual harm or immediate jeopardy level, across 218 homes. The note does not soften the finding. The finding stands on the record unless the challenge succeeds.

Who this site is for

It is written for adults choosing care for an adult, and it is not directed to children. Nothing here needs an account, and there is nothing to sign up for, so there is no age you have to be to read it. If you are under 18, the decisions this site is about are not yours to make alone, and that is a good thing.

This is not advice

This site is a record of what federal inspectors found and when. It is not medical advice, not legal advice, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to choose or avoid any home.

Deciding what any of it means for your family is your decision to make, with people who know your situation. Nothing on this site creates a professional relationship of any kind between you and us.

We do not rank homes ourselves. There is no Nursing Homes Compared score. We show Medicare's rating, explain what it does and does not measure, and put the underlying findings next to it.

No warranty

We work hard to get this right, and the site is checked automatically against the federal record before anything is published. Even so, the site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. We do not promise that it is complete, current, uninterrupted, or free of error.

To the fullest extent the law allows, NUVION LLC, which operates Nursing Homes Compared, is not liable for any loss arising from your use of this site or from anything you decided after reading it.

Some states do not allow certain limits on liability, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

What you may do with what is here

The federal data is public. CMS's files are works of the United States government. They are in the public domain and neither we nor anyone else can put a fence around them. If you want the raw records, take them from CMS directly at data.cms.gov.

Our writing is ours. The plain-English rewrites, the explanations, the page designs, the calculated figures, the site's code and the way the records are organized belong to NUVION LLC.

Crawling will be allowed. This site is not yet published on its own domain, and until it is, robots.txt disallows everything and every page asks not to be indexed. That is deliberate and temporary: an unfinished address should not be the one search engines learn. Once the site is on its own domain, robots.txt will allow every crawler, including AI assistants, on purpose. This site is a public record written in plain English, and if an assistant can answer a family's question from it, that is the site doing its job. We do not object to being read, quoted with attribution, or summarized, by a person or by a machine.

Reselling our writing is not allowed. Do not copy the site's written explanations wholesale and sell them, republish them as your own, or use them to build a competing product without permission. Take the CMS data from CMS if that is what you want. Ask us if you want to use our wording.

Do not use the site to harm anyone. Do not use it to harass a home or a person, to misrepresent what it says, to attack the site or the servers it runs on, or to break any law.

If you are a nursing home and you disagree with your page

We take this seriously and we would rather hear from you than not.

Almost everything on your page came from CMS. If the underlying record is wrong, we cannot change it, because we publish what CMS published and the next monthly refresh would overwrite any change we made. The correction has to be made at CMS, and once CMS publishes it, this site picks it up automatically at the next release.

If we have misread, mislabeled, or miscalculated something, that is ours and we will fix it.

The Corrections page explains exactly which is which and what to send us. Read that first, then write to the postal address at the foot of this page.

We do not remove a home's page because the home dislikes what the federal record says about it. We do correct anything we got wrong, promptly and in public.

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.

Changes

We may update these terms. The effective date at the top says when they last changed. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Tennessee, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the courts of Shelby County, Tennessee.

Contact

Write to us by post. This site has no email address, no contact form and no telephone line, because it collects nothing and has nobody to staff them.

Nursing Homes Compared 5400 Poplar Ave., Suite 250, Memphis, TN 38119