About ElderGrade
ElderGrade grades every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States using the federal record — 14,693 homes and 418,344 inspection citations — and shows its working on every page.
Why this exists
All of this information is already public. It is published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, it is free, and almost nobody can use it. The files are enormous, the field names are cryptic, and the most useful columns — staff turnover, weekend staffing, the actual severity of a citation, who owns the place — are buried where no family will ever find them.
Meanwhile the sites that families do find are mostly lead-generation businesses. They are paid a referral fee when you place a relative, which means the data you most need is exactly the data they have no reason to show you. "Speak to an advisor" is not a feature. It is a business model.
How we are different
- No facility pays us anything. Not for placement, not for listing, not for a better grade. There is no upgrade to buy.
- We are not a referral service. We do not take a commission on where anyone lives.
- The formula is public. Every component, every weight and every deduction is on How we grade, and each profile shows its own arithmetic.
- We publish what we do not know. Where CMS has not released a figure, the field stays blank and the home stays ungraded. We do not fill gaps with plausible guesses.
How it is funded
Advertising, and affiliate relationships with products adjacent to eldercare — never with nursing homes, chains or placement agencies. Any sponsored link is labelled as one. If we ever cannot fund the site without compromising the grades, we will say so rather than quietly change the grades.
What this is not
It is not medical, legal or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for visiting a home and talking to the people who work there. Use it to arrive informed and to ask better questions.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us. If the error is ours we will fix it and say what changed. If the error is in the federal data, we will show you where to file a correction with CMS — we publish their record faithfully and cannot alter it on request.