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.
In short: every council rate on this site comes from that council’s own published rate card or committee paper, with a link to the document and the date we last checked it. Where a council has not published one, the page says so and names the council we have asked under the Freedom of Information Act. We do not model figures, apply national multipliers or fill gaps with averages.
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.
This is a finding, not a gap. Three of the councils we have checked do not set a standard rate for care home placements:
A comparison site that shows a number for all three has modelled it. We say instead that no rate exists, and why.
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. Our full analysis of every home on the register is published as research, with the dataset available to download.
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 correct within three working days and we log every correction here permanently, with the date. We do not quietly edit.
Every care home page here carries a note about how current our information is. It is worked out from four things: how long ago the CQC published the rating (45%), what that rating was (25%), how current the ratings are across the rest of the operator’s homes (15%), and whether the home has published its fees (15%).
It is not a quality score, and it is not a judgement about care. We have never visited a care home. What we hold is the public register, and the most useful thing we can tell you about the register is how old the entries in it are.
We weight the age of a rating above the rating itself on purpose. A “Good” published in 2018 describes a building, a manager and a staff team that may share nothing but a name with what exists today. A “Requires improvement” from last month describes a real place, now.
The five bands are worded as facts rather than grades: inspected within the last two years, inspected in the last three years, around the national middle, older than most, and among the least current in England. Across the site 24% of homes fall in the first band and 25% in the last.
Homes with no published rating are given no index at all rather than a low one. Newly registered homes have not been inspected yet, and that is not a failing.
If you think a home’s index is wrong, tell us — usually it means the register has changed and we have not caught up yet.
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.
Reviewed 28 August 2026. Figures are for 2026/27 unless stated. This is information, not financial or legal advice.