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Assisted living & memory care
Assisted living is licensed and inspected by each state — not Medicare — so there is no federal 5-star rating. Where a state publishes its inspection and complaint record, we publish all of it. Where a state publishes nothing — and most don’t — we say so plainly and show you how to get it yourself, rather than let an empty record pass for a clean one. 41,804 communities across 49 states and Washington, DC — every state except Idaho. Every state licenses a different set of things and calls them all assisted living, so these totals count different things and are not comparable to each other — each state page says exactly what its number is made of.
Before you use this list: for most of it we have a roster, not a record.
Medicare-certified nursing homes are surveyed on a federal schedule, and what the inspector found is public for every one of them. Assisted living has no federal equivalent — each state licenses it and decides for itself what to release — and most states do not publish their inspection and complaint records in any bulk form we can ingest. So of the 41,804 communities listed here:
16,482 of them (39%), across 30 states and Washington, DC, have no state inspection record here at all — those places publish none in a bulk file, so what we hold is the licence: a name, an address, a licence type, a bed count. We are not withholding a record from those pages. We do not have one.
6,995 (16%) are in states that do publish a record, but have no rows in it. That means no published findings — the extract is a snapshot of what the state chose to release, and a community can be missing from it simply because it was not inspected in the window.
12,535 (29%) have findings we publish in full, itemized on the community’s own page.
5,792 (13%) are covered by a state record that shows nothing against them — the only ones anywhere on this site we will call clean.
Read a community with no record as unknown, not as clean. That is the whole point of splitting those numbers out rather than leaving you to assume a quiet page is a good one. We will not paper over it with a rating of our own invention: we do not score these communities, and we do not rank a state whose record we cannot read. Every state page names that state’s licensing agency and links to where you can ask for a specific community’s record yourself — and your Long-Term Care Ombudsman ↗ is free, independent, and knows the local ones.
What that 41,804 actually counts.
It is one row per state licence, and states license very different things: 9,369 × Assisted living, 8,781 × Assisted living, 2,565 × PCH, 2,412 × Adult foster home. 15,654 of the 36,744 communities that publish a bed count (42%) are licensed for 6 beds or fewer — residential homes, often an ordinary house, rather than the apartment-style community most people picture when they read “assisted living”. They are real licensed care and we will not delete them to make this number look tidier, but it means the total is a count of licences, not of interchangeable places. Each state page breaks its own number down, and you can filter by bed count in Explore.
We do not cover Idaho — and we would rather say so than let you assume we do.
Idaho: Idaho’s licensed-facility roster (FLARES) is behind a bot check that blocks bulk access, so we have no address-level list of Idaho residential assisted-living facilities. Rather than publish a partial or stale one, we publish none. Idaho DHW licenses several hundred RALFs — ask Idaho DHW ↗ or the Long-Term Care Ombudsman ↗ for the list while we work on it.