Methodology and sources

The files

CMS publishes these files for Medicare Care Compare once a month. We download each one whole from the CMS Provider Data Catalog, keep a fingerprint of the exact file, and rebuild every page from it.

This release covers 14,690 nursing homes, 418,947 health citations, 200,188 fire safety citations, 15,419 penalties and 251,314 owner and manager records.

What we show, and how

• Star ratings are CMS's own. We do not compute, adjust or combine them, and we do not publish a score of our own.
• Citations appear with the scope and severity letter inspectors gave them, the date, whether they came from a complaint visit, and the correction status CMS records. A citation marked "past noncompliance" was found and already fixed when inspectors arrived. Citations a home disputed through informal dispute resolution are marked as disputed.
• Plain-English text for each citation starts with CMS's own short description of the federal requirement (the F-tag), then the scope and severity in words, then the correction status.
• Inspector summaries: under each health citation we quote what the inspector wrote, from CMS's monthly file of 2567 statements of deficiencies (data as of September 1, 2026; 418,644 of 418,947 citations carry text). We quote the part before "Findings include", where the inspector states what the home failed to do and for how many residents, and stop at about 900 characters on a sentence end, marked [...]. CMS removes names before publishing; we also remove any phone number, email address or courtesy-title name left in the text, and change long dashes to hyphens. Otherwise the words are the inspector's, unedited. The detailed findings that follow are on the home's Medicare.gov page.
• Citation code pages: each of the 263 F-tags in the current files has a page with its national count, severity mix, states and most recent citations, counted from the same CMS rows. All F-tags.
• Averages for the state and the nation are the ones CMS publishes in the same release.
• Owners are listed as CMS lists them. Group pages follow CMS's own chain (affiliated entity) assignments.
• Visit questions on each home's page are picked by rule from the categories of that home's own citations. They are prompts for a family, not findings.
• Medicaid: a home certified for Medicaid can take Medicaid residents, but CMS does not report whether a Medicaid bed is open. Ask the home.

Staffing by quarter

Every certified home reports to CMS, for each day, the hours worked by each type of nursing staff (employees and contract staff separately) and its resident census: the Payroll Based Journal. We download the daily file for each of the last 4 quarters from data.cms.gov and add it up. Hours per resident per day are all hours in the quarter divided by all resident days, the way CMS calculates its own staffing figures: registered nurses include the director of nursing and RNs with administrative duties, licensed practical nurses include those with administrative duties, and aides include nurse aides in training and medication aides. Weekends are Saturday and Sunday. Contract share is the part of nursing hours worked by contract or agency staff. Days with no residents are left out.

Check: for January to March 2026, the quarter behind the staffing CMS currently publishes, our total for each home matches CMS's figure for 14,333 of 14,335 homes, to within 0.01 hours. Earlier quarters use the same method on earlier files. The figures are not adjusted for how sick residents are; CMS's case-mix figure on each home's page is.

Owner pages

The CMS ownership file lists, for each home, the people and organizations with a 5% or greater ownership stake and those with operational or managerial control, as the home reported them when enrolling. We publish a page for an organization (never a person) that the file lists with a direct or indirect ownership interest in three or more certified homes: 1,300 organizations today. Two kinds are left out. Organizations whose main role in the file is not ownership (lenders, accounting firms and service companies appear under control, security, mortgage or "additional disclosable party" roles), and names containing "trust", which are mostly family trusts named after people. Spellings that differ only in punctuation are combined; nothing else is merged. When an owner's homes are mostly the same as a CMS chain or a larger owner page (holding companies often own the same homes in layers), its page links to that page and is kept out of search results.

State contacts

Each state page, and each home's page, links the state survey agency (it inspects homes for CMS and takes complaints), the state's own inspection records where it publishes them, and the long-term care ombudsman program. Every link was taken from the office's own site and checked live on October 8, 2026; phone numbers are copied as printed there. A link we could not check is left off rather than guessed.

What we do not do

• No home can pay to change its place in a list, its ratings, its citations or anything else the data says.
• We do not call a home "best" or "worst". Lists are ordered by name, town, or a CMS figure, and say which.
• We do not publish reviews or star ratings collected from other websites.
• We are not affiliated with CMS, Medicare or any state agency, and nothing here is endorsed by them.

History

CMS's files hold only the current ratings and staffing. We keep a dated copy of each month's ratings and staffing for every home, so pages can show how a home has changed over time as those months add up.

Corrections

The dated log of fixes is on the corrections page. If a page shows something different from CMS's current file, email editor@nursinghomeclear.com with the page address. We check it against the file and fix our copy, and the next monthly rebuild is checked again. If you believe a citation itself is wrong, only the state inspection agency and CMS can change it: homes can dispute citations through the state's informal dispute resolution process, and Medicare.gov shows the outcome.