About this site

An independent project that turns Medicare's nursing-home records into pages a family can actually read.

Last reviewed 9 August 2026.

Why it exists

Most people choose a nursing home in the worst week of their year. A parent is in hospital, a discharge date has been set, and someone has a few days to decide. The federal government publishes a great deal of relevant information, and almost none of it is in a shape that helps under that kind of pressure.

Two things in particular go missing. The first is proximity: most families are really choosing among the handful of places close enough to visit often, and visiting often is itself among the better protections a resident has. The second is weekend staffing. Medicare publishes registered-nurse coverage for weekends separately from weekdays, and the gap is frequently large — but you would have to go looking for it. Nobody puts it in front of you. We do, on every page where the data supports it.

What it is

A page for every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States — about 14,700 of them — plus a page for every ZIP code with a facility near it, so you can start from where you live rather than from a name you already know.

Each facility page shows staffing and how it changes at weekends, inspection findings grouped by how serious they were, fines, disclosed ownership and affiliations, the nearest alternatives with their figures side by side, and a short list of questions those particular numbers suggest you ask on a visit.

What it isn't

We don't rank facilities, score them, or call any of them good or bad. Every number here describes something that was recorded on a particular date by an inspector or a payroll system. That is genuinely useful and genuinely limited, and running it through a scoring formula would disguise both.

We also aren't Medicare, aren't affiliated with any government agency, and aren't connected to any facility, chain or operator. If you want the official source, it is Medicare's Care Compare.

Who runs it

An independent project, not a company and not funded by anyone in the long-term care industry. We've chosen to be accountable through method rather than through a masthead: how we read the data sets out every dataset we use and every calculation we make, in enough detail to check our work, and corrections are answered by a person and published. Those seem more useful to you than a name would be.

How it pays for itself

Through advertising, and that is the only way. We take no payment from facilities, operators, chains or referral services. No one can pay to appear, to rank higher, to soften a page or to remove one. There is no "featured facility," no sponsored placement, and no lead-generation arrangement — which matters in this sector, because a great many sites that look like directories are actually paid referral businesses.

Where you see an advertisement it is clearly marked as one, and its presence has no bearing on what any page says.

One consequence worth naming plainly: the advertisers who bid most for space alongside nursing-home content are often those same referral businesses. Advertising here is sold by Google, not by us. We don't choose which companies appear, we have no relationship with them, and we can't vouch for them. An advertisement on this site is not a recommendation, and it has nothing to do with what the page around it says.

How current it is

CMS republishes most of its nursing-home files monthly, and we rebuild the entire site from a fresh download rather than editing pages in place. Different measures cover different periods — some run close to a year behind others — so each figure is dated where it appears instead of under a single site-wide timestamp that would be wrong for most of them.

Getting in touch

Corrections, questions and anything that looks wrong: corrections@wheretheycare.com. If you work at a facility we cover, we especially want to hear from you — see corrections.

We can't advise on care decisions, and nothing here is medical or legal advice. For complaints about a facility, your state survey agency or long-term care ombudsman can act where we can't.