Home › Guides › Where our numbers come from
Most care directories show you a price. Almost none show you where it came from, or when anyone last checked.
Families are shown all three and told they are the same thing. They are not.
| What it is | Where it comes from | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| The council’s standard rate | The council’s own published rate card, this financial year | The floor. What a council will pay for a new placement, and the number to negotiate against |
| The council’s average actual cost | NHS England’s Adult Social Care Finance Return, two to three years old | Context only. Pulled upwards by complex and individually negotiated placements |
| The self-funder fee | The home itself, on the phone | The only number that will appear on an invoice |
We publish the first where we have it, label the second clearly if we show it at all, and never estimate the third.
We do not multiply a council rate by a national average to invent a self-funder figure. Two comparison sites do exactly that, using a premium calculated by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2018 and applied identically to Westminster and to Liverpool. The arithmetic is real. The resulting number is not.
Sandwell publishes its nursing rate as £775.11 a week. The home actually receives £1,042.79, because the NHS pays the nursing element of £267.68 directly on top. Both figures are true.
A council quoting the second looks 35% more generous than one quoting the first, while paying exactly the same. Every nursing rate on this site is labelled with which of the two it is. Where we cannot establish that, we publish the residential rate alone and leave nursing blank.
We publish a council’s rate only where that council has published one itself, or answered a Freedom of Information request. That is slower than modelling a number, and it means large parts of the map are still blank. We would rather show a gap than fill it.
Roughly one council in four publishes a clean, current rate. The rest use district-level price points, level-based models tied to individual need, or figures that have not been revised in years — Kent’s published guide price for residential care is £432.62, against an actual average of about £1,187.
Where we cannot get a figure we can stand behind, the page says so and names the council we have asked under the Freedom of Information Act. It stays that way until they answer. An empty space is more useful than a plausible invention.
Ratings come from the Care Quality Commission’s public register. We show the date each rating was published and how old it is, because across England the middle home was last judged more than four years ago and the badge on the wall never mentions that.
Where a home has no published rating we say “not rated” rather than leaving a blank that reads like a bad score. New homes have not been inspected yet, and homes offering several services are sometimes rated service by service rather than as a whole.
Everything here comes from public registers, not from the homes. If something is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the register.
We publish prices and register data. We are not an advice service, and for the decisions that follow these are the sources worth your time — all free, none of them selling you anything.