NursingHomeDex — Nursing home ratings and inspection data
Star ratings, inspections, staffing and penalties for 14,710+ Medicare-certified facilities, packaged so families can compare options in minutes.
Picking a nursing home shouldn't be guesswork
Placing a parent in long-term care is a decision people carry for years. The US government actually publishes everything needed to make it well — CMS rates, inspects and fines every certified facility — but the information sits scattered across bureaucratic tools. NursingHomeDex is my own product that consolidates it into one honest comparison site.
On a single screen a family sees how a facility scores on the 5-star system, what inspectors found, how staffing stacks up and whether penalties are piling up. That beats choosing from a brochure every time.
What NursingHomeDex offers
- Instant search by facility name, city, ZIP code or state.
- Rich facility profiles: overall star rating, inspection history, penalties, staffing levels, quality measures, beds and ownership type.
- Side-by-side comparison so two candidate homes can be judged on identical criteria.
- Top Rated ranking of 5-star facilities plus a dedicated penalties section for spotting red flags.
- Find Best tool that recommends the strongest facilities near any location.
- National statistics and state hubs covering the entire country, backed by an editorial blog.
Dataset coverage
The scope is every Medicare-certified nursing home in America — 14,710 and counting — refreshed monthly from CMS records. State pages span the full map from Alabama to Wyoming, plus DC, Puerto Rico and Guam, and the homepage showcase runs from an 843-bed nonprofit in New York to county-run centers in Pennsylvania, each wearing its star rating openly.
Check it out live: Visit nursinghomedex.com.
The build
Same engineering philosophy as my other data products: a hand-built Laravel + PHP application on MySQL, with the schema designed around fast rendering of thousands of facility, state and ranking pages. No off-the-shelf CMS, no plugin stack to babysit.
Programmatic SEO does the acquisition work — a unique, indexable URL with tailored metadata for every facility and state — while the monthly refresh cycle keeps content current, which matters doubly in a niche where stale data erodes trust instantly.
Questions people ask
Where do the ratings on NursingHomeDex come from?
From CMS — the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — which certifies every nursing home in the database and publishes its 5-star quality rating system. The site rebuilds its dataset from those official records every month.
What does a facility profile include?
The overall star rating (1 to 5), inspection history, penalties, staffing levels, quality measures, bed count and ownership type — whether for-profit, non-profit or government-run. Featured homes range from 843-bed nonprofit centers to county facilities.
How complete is the coverage?
All 14,710+ Medicare-certified nursing homes across the 50 states, with Puerto Rico, Guam and the District of Columbia browsable too. If Medicare certifies it, it has a page.
What tools help families shortlist a home?
Side-by-side comparison, a Top Rated ranking of 5-star facilities, a dedicated penalties section for red flags, and the Find Best tool that surfaces the strongest options near a given location.