Data & methodology
Everything on Eldercare Lens is built from public records. This page says exactly which ones, when they were cut, what we do to them, and where the gaps are — so you can check our work, quote it, or reproduce it.
Coverage
| What | How many | Source | Vintage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nursing homes (certified) | 14,690 | CMS Provider Data Catalog | 2026-08-01 |
| …reporting usable staffing | 14,288 | CMS Payroll-Based Journal | 2026-08-01 |
| State assisted-living rosters | 43 states | State licensing agencies | rolling |
| State AL enforcement records | 12 states | State inspection portals | rolling |
Download
The aggregate behind our staffing report, free to use with attribution:
- nursing-home-staffing-by-state.csv — share of nursing homes in each state below at least one threshold of the (repealed) federal minimum staffing rule, with denominators. 49 states.
Facility-level extracts for a specific state or region: ask and we’ll send them. There is no charge and nothing to sign up for. We don’t publish our compiled 50-state assisted-living enforcement corpus in bulk — that one took real work to assemble and isn’t re-downloadable from any single source — but we’ll share cuts of it for research or reporting.
How to cite
Eldercare Lens, “Nursing home staffing by state,” derived from the CMS Provider Data Catalog (2026-08-01). https://eldercarelens.com/reports/nursing-home-staffing-gap/
Questions we get asked
Where does the underlying data come from?
Nursing home ratings, inspections, penalties, ownership and staffing come from the CMS Provider Data Catalog and the Payroll-Based Journal — US federal public records. Assisted living has no federal equivalent, so those come from each state’s own licensing agency, state by state.
Do facilities pay to be listed, or to change what you show?
No. We take no money from any facility, operator or referral service, and there is no lead form on this site. Nothing a facility could pay for would change a single figure. That is the whole reason this site exists.
How current is it?
The CMS extract carries its own processing date — currently 2026-08-01 — and we show that date rather than the date we happened to rebuild the site. CMS refreshes monthly. State assisted-living sources refresh on their own schedules, which vary from daily to annually.
What are the known gaps?
402 nursing homes report no usable staffing figures; they are excluded from staffing statistics rather than counted as zero. Assisted living has no national inspection standard, so enforcement depth varies sharply by state — 12 states publish records we can attach to individual communities, and for the rest we say so on the page instead of implying a clean record. Star ratings are CMS’s, not ours; we show the components un-blended rather than inventing a score of our own.
Can I reproduce your numbers?
Yes, and that is the intent. Every report states its own arithmetic, its exclusions, and its cut-offs. Nothing is hand-entered — each figure is recomputed from the source file on every build.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it and say what changed. Errors in the federal source we’ll pass upstream to CMS, and we’ll note the discrepancy on the affected page in the meantime.