How this works
Where do these numbers come from?
Every figure is reproduced from California Department of Social Services licensing records. We add no rating, score or ranking of our own, and nothing on this site can be bought.
The sources
| Source | What it provides | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| CDSS Community Care Licensing bulk files | Every licensed facility, its type, address, capacity and licence status | Daily at source |
| CDSS facility transparency records | Visit counts by category, Type A and Type B citations, complaint allegation outcomes, licensee and administrator, and the reports on file | Continuous at source |
17,808 providers are currently published, generated 2026-08-20.
What Type A and Type B mean
California issues citations in two severities. A Type A citation means a violation that poses an immediate risk to the health, safety or personal rights of a resident. A Type B citation is a violation that does not create immediate risk. Both are the state’s determinations, not ours.
Four rules we hold ourselves to
- We reproduce the state’s own totals and never re-aggregate them. The state publishes headline citation figures covering complaint investigations, and reports inspection and other visits separately. Adding those together would produce a larger number than the state itself publishes, so we don’t. Both are shown, labelled.
- A missing value is shown as missing. The state uses -1 to mean “not applicable”. We render that as no data rather than as zero.
- Every figure carries its source and the date we retrieved it. Licensing records change. A page tells you how old its data is.
- Legal names are reproduced exactly. Licensee names appear as the state publishes them, because altering an entity name in a public record is not ours to do.
What we do not do
- We do not rank facilities, score them, or order lists by anything but the alphabet.
- We do not sell placement, position or prominence. There is no paid tier that changes what a reader sees first.
- We do not remove a citation because an operator asks. Operators get a right of reply on their page, never a right of removal.
- We do not take a commission on a move-in.
Known limits
- Licensing data lags reality. A visit that happened last week may not appear for some time, and a facility may have corrected a problem the record still shows.
- Citation counts are lifetime figures for the current licence. A home licensed in 2005 has had more opportunities to be cited than one licensed in 2021, and the raw count does not adjust for that.
- Acceptance criteria are parsed from a free-text field written by licensing analysts. We show our reading and the analyst’s original wording side by side so you can check us.
- Coverage today is all 54 California counties — 17,808 licensed providers. Other states are not yet published.
If something here is wrong
Tell us and we will fix it, or explain why the record says what it says. Report a correction.