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Inspection records are public, free, and specific — down to the date, the regulation cited, and how serious inspectors judged it. Most families never look, because the records are published in a format built for regulators rather than for people making a decision in a week.
Search the facility by name or city in the search box on this site, or browse by state. Each page carries the full citation history from 2023 onward plus all-time counts, drawn directly from CMS's published inspection files. The same underlying data is on Medicare's Care Compare and in the CMS Provider Data Catalog.
Every citation carries a scope-and-severity letter from A to L. This single letter matters more than the number of citations:
| Letters | What it means | How to weigh it |
|---|---|---|
| A–C | No actual harm, minimal violation | Common; look at patterns, not individual instances |
| D–F | Potential for more than minimal harm | The bulk of citations. Watch for the same issue repeating |
| G–I | Actual harm occurred | Serious. Read the detail and ask about it |
| J–L | Immediate jeopardy — danger of serious injury or death | The most severe. 4,419 facilities nationally have at least one on record |
The second dimension is scope: isolated, pattern, or widespread. A widespread D can indicate a systemic failure more reliably than an isolated G.
Bring the citation dates to the tour. "Your March inspection cited medication administration errors — what changed?" A good administrator will know the citation, explain the correction, and show you the plan. A defensive or vague answer is itself information.
For problems with a facility right now, contact your state's long-term care ombudsman — a free advocate for residents — or file a complaint with the state survey agency. Complaints trigger investigations, and those investigations become public records that help the next family.
Yes. Federal law requires inspection results for Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing homes to be public. They are published by CMS, mirrored on Medicare's Care Compare, and reproduced with the citation detail on this site.
A citation at scope-and-severity level J, K, or L, meaning inspectors found a situation that caused or was likely to cause serious injury, harm, impairment, or death. It is the most serious category and warrants direct questions to the facility.
Certified nursing homes receive a standard health inspection roughly annually, with the exact interval varying, plus additional investigations whenever a complaint is filed. Facilities on the Special Focus list are inspected about twice as often.
Weigh recency and repetition. An old, corrected citation under a previous operator matters less than a recent one, or the same deficiency appearing across multiple inspection cycles, which suggests the correction plan is not working.
Records for 14,693 nursing homes and 5,584 assisted living facilities: search by name or city · browse by state · by ownership group.
This guide is general information from public sources, not medical, legal, or financial advice. Program rules and dollar figures change annually and vary by state — verify with Medicare.gov, your state Medicaid agency, or a certified elder law attorney before acting.