Guide
Care Compare Data: What’s in the Provider File
Care Compare is the consumer website. The data behind it is the Provider Information file, published monthly as a single row per certified nursing home and keyed on the facility’s CCN. The August 2026 file carries 14,690 facilities. It is the widest single view of the industry that exists.
What the file carries
| Field group | Contents |
|---|---|
| Identity and location | CCN, name, address, county, ownership type, bed count, average residents per day |
| Ratings | Overall, health inspection, staffing and quality measure stars, each with a footnote column |
| Staffing hours | Reported, case-mix and adjusted hours per resident day, plus nurse and administrator turnover |
| Survey summary | Three rating cycles: survey dates, deficiency counts, revisits and weighted scores |
| Penalties | Fines, total fine dollars, payment denials, substantiated complaints |
| Flags | Abuse icon, Special Focus status, sprinkler status, resident and family council |
Published on data.cms.gov, refreshed monthly, with archives back to 2017. For how the stars are actually calculated, see the Five-Star guide.
What you can find out
- How a facility rates today
- Overall, health inspection, staffing and quality measure stars, refreshed monthly.
- Whether it is moving
- Monthly files back to 2017 turn a single rating into a trend rather than a snapshot.
- How it compares locally
- Every certified facility in a county sits in the same file, on the same fields.
- Whether it has been penalised
- Fines, total fine dollars, payment denials and substantiated complaints.
- Whether it carries a flag
- The abuse icon and Special Focus status. In the August 2026 file 1,426 facilities carry the abuse icon.
- Why a rating is blank
- A missing star is suppressed, not zero. Footnote columns beside each rating give the reason, usually too few residents or too little survey history.
Going deeper
- Nursing home data: what exists and where it comes from
- How the CMS Five-Star rating works
- Nursing home ownership data (PECOS)
Every month, already loaded
SNF Insights keeps every monthly file back to 2017 on one facility record, so a rating or staffing change can be read as a trend rather than a single month.
Request a demoCounts reflect the August 2026 CMS file and change with each monthly release. SNF Insights is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CMS.