Editorial policy
How we decide what to show and how we keep it independent of payment.
Where our information comes from
Ratings, inspections, fines, staffing, quality measures, ownership and costs come from Medicare (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). We show them as Medicare publishes them and refresh them every week when Medicare releases new data. Each page says how current its data is.
Our guides cite their official sources at the bottom of each article, with the date they were last updated.
What payment can and cannot change
- No home can pay to change its Medicare ratings, inspection findings, fines or any other Medicare figure, or to have them hidden.
- No home can pay to be ranked. Our best-rated lists are ordered only by Medicare’s ratings, with ties broken the same way for every home.
- Homes on a paid plan can add photos, a description, programs and a response beside a finding. That information is labeled as coming from the home.
- Paid placement in search is always labeled Sponsored. The regular list below it stays in Medicare-rating order.
- We never charge families per lead or per admission, and we don’t take referral fees from nursing homes.
Responses from homes
Any home can add a short response beside something Medicare’s data flags. We check that the person works at the home before publishing it. Responses appear next to the finding, never instead of it, and are marked as written by the home and not verified by Medicare.
Plain-language summaries
Summaries such as “At a glance” and “In plain English” are written by rules that compare each home with its state average, so every home is described the same way. They use only Medicare’s figures and never a home’s own claims.