Where to Find a Nursing Home's Inspection Record

Start at Medicare's Care Compare

The national front door is Medicare's Care Compare. It is the official federal tool for finding and comparing Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes, and it shows each home's quality star rating, its health-inspection results, and its staffing 1Ref 1Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Care Compare).That Care Compare is the official federal tool for finding and comparing Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes by star ratings, health-inspection results, and staffing.. For most families it is the fastest route from a home's name to its public record, and it costs nothing to use.

You can search by a home's name or by an area, and every certified home in the country appears. What you are reading is not a review site or a marketing page; it is the same data the government uses to oversee these facilities.

What CMS Care Compare gives you first is a distilled view — a rating and a few headline numbers. That is the summary. The rest of this page is about the record underneath it, because the summary is where the search begins, not where it should end.

What sits behind Care Compare: the raw datasets

Beneath the tool sits the data it is built from, and you can download it directly. The CMS Provider Data Catalog publishes the Provider Information dataset — per-facility certified beds, star ratings, staffing measures, and quality-measure scores for every certified home 2Ref 2Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Provider Information (Nursing homes including rehab services dataset).That the downloadable Provider Information dataset in the CMS Provider Data Catalog contains per-facility certified beds, star ratings, staffing measures, and quality-measure scores for all certified nursing homes. — and the Survey Summary dataset, which holds each home's last three years of health, fire-safety, infection-control, and complaint inspections, with dates and counts of citations attached 3Ref 3Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Survey Summary (Nursing homes including rehab services dataset).That the Survey Summary dataset holds each facility's last three years of health, fire-safety, infection-control, and complaint inspections, including inspection dates and counts of citations and deficiencies..

There are two reasons to go one layer down rather than stopping at the tool. You can compare many homes at once instead of one at a time. And you can check a figure the summary rounded or a claim a home makes in its brochure against the underlying record.

This is public data, not a researcher's resource. You do not need special access or software to open it. It is the same inspection record Care Compare shows, moved one step closer to the source, where nothing has been summarized away.

How the star is built, in three parts

The overall star is not a single opinion; it is three measured things combined. The CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System rates each home one to five stars overall and on three separate domains: health inspections, staffing, and quality measures 4Ref 4Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Five-Star Quality Rating System.That the CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System rates each certified nursing home one to five stars overall and on three domains — health inspections, staffing, and quality measures.. Seeing that the overall star is an average of parts is what lets you notice a home a single number would hide.

The three ratings behind the nursing home star can pull in different directions. A home can carry a respectable overall star while its health-inspection domain — the one built from what surveyors actually saw on-site — is the weakest of the three. Another can look mediocre overall but hold a strong inspection record.

The overall star is an average of three domains; the health-inspection domain, drawn from on-site surveys, is the one worth weighting most heavily.

So when you read a nursing home star rating, split it apart. The health-inspection score is the closest thing to an independent set of eyes inside the building, and it is the one a marketing tour cannot stage for you.

The staffing number, and what changed in 2025

Staffing is one of the three domains, and the rule behind it moved recently, so the number needs context. In December 2025, CMS repealed the 2024 federal minimum-staffing standard for nursing homes — removing the 24-hour on-site registered-nurse requirement and the hours-per-resident-day minimums — and reinstated the prior standard of a registered nurse on-site at least eight consecutive hours a day, seven days a week 5Ref 5Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2025).Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Repeal of Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care Facilities.That in December 2025 CMS repealed the 2024 federal minimum-staffing rule for nursing homes, removing the 24-hour on-site registered-nurse and hours-per-resident-day minimums and reinstating the prior standard of a registered nurse on-site at least eight consecutive hours a day, seven days a week..

Why this matters for a record you read today: the staffing star reflects a floor that was briefly raised and then lowered again. A home meeting the current federal standard is meeting a lighter requirement than the 2024 rule set.

The practical response is to read the staffing hours themselves, not only the star built on top of them. The datasets report measured staffing per resident, and that raw figure — how many hands are actually in the building relative to how many residents need them — survives changes in the rule that grades it.

The star is a starting point, not a verdict

A rating is a summary, and summaries can mislead in both directions. Federal watchdogs have shown the limit directly: among the poorest-performing homes that graduated from CMS's Special Focus Facility program, 64% went on to receive a serious deficiency within three years 6Ref 6U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (2025).CMS's Special Focus Facility Program for Nursing Homes Has Not Yielded Lasting Improvements.That within three years of graduating from CMS's Special Focus Facility program for the poorest-performing nursing homes, 64% of facilities received a serious deficiency (2013-2022).. A rating captures a moment, and care drifts.

So the rating opens the inquiry rather than closing it. The substance is in the underlying document — the statement of deficiencies behind those citation counts, often called the CMS-2567 — which describes, in a surveyor's own words, what was found and whom it affected. Learning to read a nursing home inspection report is the skill that turns a number back into a story.

Two more parts of the same public record are worth pulling:

• Whether the home has been fined. You can look up fines and penalties — the civil money penalties a home has paid — which sit alongside the inspection findings.
• What each citation actually means. A deficiency is graded for scope and severity, and understanding what a deficiency citation actually means keeps you from reading a paperwork lapse and a resident harm as the same thing.

What the national record will not show, and where to go next

The national online record is broad but not complete. Care Compare covers certified homes and leans toward the standardized data; it is thinner on the granular complaint narrative and does not reach facilities a state licenses but Medicare does not certify. For the fuller complaint detail and a state's own enforcement file, there is a second source.

That source is your state's inspection portal, run by the agency that actually performs the surveys. The federal Survey Summary tells you a home had, say, three complaint inspections and how many citations resulted 3Ref 3Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Survey Summary (Nursing homes including rehab services dataset).That the Survey Summary dataset holds each facility's last three years of health, fire-safety, infection-control, and complaint inspections, including inspection dates and counts of citations and deficiencies.; the state portal is often where the fuller text and the state-level actions live.

Finding your state's inspection portal is the companion move to Care Compare, not a replacement for it. The two records overlap and diverge, and a careful family reads both — the national tool for the standardized comparison, the state portal for the depth and the homes the federal net does not catch.