Every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States is inspected by state surveyors, and the results of those inspections, including every violation found, are publicly available online. The fastest way to check a specific facility is through Medicare’s Care Compare tool at medicare.gov, which lists inspection findings, penalty history, and quality ratings for nearly every nursing home in the country. But that’s just the starting point. Several other federal and state resources give you a more complete picture.
Start With Medicare Care Compare
Medicare’s Care Compare tool lets you search for any Medicare-certified nursing home by name, city, or zip code. Each facility’s profile includes a star rating (1 to 5 stars), recent inspection results, staffing data, and quality measures. The inspection tab is where you’ll find the actual violations.
What you’re looking for are “deficiencies,” which is the official term for violations. Each deficiency listed on a facility’s profile describes what the surveyors found, how severe the problem was, and how many residents were affected. Facilities with serious abuse-related violations get a special alert icon on their profile. That icon appears when a facility has been cited for abuse that caused actual harm on its most recent inspection, or when it’s been cited for abuse with potential for harm on two consecutive inspection cycles.
Care Compare also shows penalties. If a nursing home has been fined or had Medicare payments denied in the last three years, those amounts appear on the facility’s profile. You can also download the full penalties dataset directly from the CMS Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov), which lists every fine and payment denial issued to nursing homes nationwide.
How to Read Inspection Reports
The actual inspection report for each nursing home is a document called the Statement of Deficiencies and Plan of Correction (Form CMS-2567). This is the detailed, narrative account of what surveyors observed during their visit. Each deficiency includes a description of what went wrong, a federal regulation code identifying the standard that was violated, and the facility’s written plan for fixing the problem, including a specific deadline for correction.
Not all violations are equal, and the system uses a letter grade from A through L to indicate how serious each one is. That grid measures two things: severity (how much harm occurred or could occur) and scope (how many residents were affected). Here’s how the scale breaks down:
- Levels A, B, C: No actual harm and only potential for minimal harm. These are the least serious findings.
- Levels D, E, F: No actual harm yet, but potential for more than minimal harm. A D is isolated (one or a few residents), E is a pattern, and F is widespread throughout the facility.
- Levels G, H, I: Actual harm occurred but did not constitute immediate jeopardy. These are significant violations showing residents were negatively affected.
- Levels J, K, L: Immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety. These are the most serious findings, meaning the problem caused or could reasonably cause serious injury or death. Immediate corrective action is required.
When reviewing a report, focus on the severity level first. A facility with a handful of A-level deficiencies is in a very different situation than one with G-level or higher findings. Also look at whether the same types of problems recur across multiple inspection cycles, which signals a systemic issue rather than a one-time lapse. Reports become publicly available 14 days after they’re provided to the facility.
Check Your State’s Database
Many states run their own inspection portals that can provide more granular or more frequently updated information than the federal tool. Indiana, for example, publishes nursing home report cards that score facilities across 45 compliance requirements from each of their last three standard inspections, weighted by scope and severity, and recalculated monthly. This lets you track whether a facility is improving or declining over time and compare its performance against the statewide average.
To find your state’s version, search for your state’s department of health plus “nursing home inspections” or “long-term care survey results.” States like California (via the California Department of Public Health), Texas (via the Health and Human Services Commission), and Florida (via the Agency for Health Care Administration) each maintain searchable databases. Some states include complaint investigation results that may not yet appear in the federal system, and a few publish inspection reports faster than CMS does.
How Often Inspections Happen
Federal law requires every nursing home to receive a standard health inspection no later than 15 months after the previous one. In practice, states aim for roughly annual surveys, though the actual interval can stretch close to that 15-month limit depending on staffing and priorities. Complaint-based inspections can happen at any time, triggered by reports from residents, families, or staff, and those results are also posted publicly.
This means the most recent inspection report you find could be anywhere from a few weeks to over a year old. If the facility’s last standard survey was 12 or more months ago, check whether any complaint surveys have been conducted in the meantime, as those often reveal problems that develop between scheduled inspections.
Use Staffing Data as a Warning Sign
Staffing levels are one of the strongest predictors of care quality, and Medicare publishes this data separately from inspection results. Each nursing home reports daily staffing hours, which Medicare converts into a ratio of staffing hours per resident per day. The staffing rating factors in registered nurse hours, total staffing hours (including weekend coverage), staff turnover rates, and administrator turnover within the past year.
A facility that earns a 1-star staffing rating may not have a registered nurse onsite every day, may have failed to submit staffing data, or may have data that couldn’t be verified. High turnover among nursing staff and administrators is a red flag even when inspection results look clean, because it suggests instability that often precedes care breakdowns. You can find all of this on the staffing tab of any facility’s Care Compare profile.
Contact the Long-Term Care Ombudsman
Every state has a Long-Term Care Ombudsman program staffed by advocates who are certified to investigate complaints in nursing homes, rest homes, and assisted living facilities. Ombudsmen visit facilities regularly, mediate disputes between residents and staff, and track complaint patterns over time. Anyone can file a complaint or request information, whether you’re a resident, a family member, or someone researching facilities before making a decision.
What makes the ombudsman’s office valuable is context. They can tell you about complaint trends or recurring concerns at a specific facility that may not show up in formal inspection data. They can also explain what certain violations mean in practical terms and whether a facility has been responsive to past problems. To find your local ombudsman, visit the Eldercare Locator at eldercare.acl.gov or call 1-800-677-1116.
Putting It All Together
No single source gives you the full picture. A facility might have a clean recent inspection but a pattern of fines over the past three years, or a low star rating driven primarily by staffing problems that haven’t yet resulted in cited deficiencies. The most reliable approach is to cross-reference multiple sources: check the Care Compare profile for star ratings and recent inspections, review the full CMS-2567 report for details on what surveyors actually found, look up your state’s database for additional findings or more recent data, and contact the ombudsman for on-the-ground perspective.
Pay the most attention to patterns. A single low-severity deficiency in one inspection cycle is common and not necessarily alarming. Repeated violations in the same category, high-severity findings (G level or above), abuse-related citations, or a combination of poor staffing ratings and inspection problems all point to deeper issues worth taking seriously.