How old is the rating on the care home wall?

Every care home for older people on the CQC register, checked for one thing: how long ago the regulator actually published its verdict.

More than 150,000 care home beds in England sit in homes whose last published inspection verdict is over five years old. The middle home in the country was last judged 4.1 years ago.

Homes analysed10,980for older people, England

Rating over 5 years old4,43840% of all homes

Beds behind those ratings153,401of 423,945

No published rating55022,183 beds

Source: Care Quality Commission, Care directory with ratings, 4 August 2026. Method below. Download the full dataset.

Nearly two thirds are working from a pre-2023 judgement

Rating more than 3 years old: 6,845 · 62%
More than 5 years old: 4,438 · 40%
More than 7 years old: 2,399 · 22%
Median age of a rating: 4.1 years

The sharper number

391 homes rated “Requires improvement” or “Inadequate” have not been re-rated in more than five years — 14,445 beds between them. These are homes the regulator itself judged to be falling short, and then published nothing further on for half a decade.

An old “Inadequate” does not mean a home is still inadequate. It means nobody has published a finding either way. That is the point: families cannot tell the difference, and neither can we.

Region

The pattern is not the one you would expect. The wealthiest regions have among the oldest inspection records; London has the freshest.

Region	Homes	Over 5y	Median age
East of England	1,200	46.8%	5y
South East	2,040	44.3%	4.5y
West Midlands	1,213	43.6%	4.6y
North West	1,481	41.1%	4.1y
South West	1,398	39.2%	4y
Yorkshire and The Humber	1,111	39%	3.9y
North East	560	35.7%	3.6y
East Midlands	1,098	33.4%	3.6y
London	821	30%	3.5y

Councils with the oldest records

Areas with at least 60 care homes, ranked by the share whose rating is over five years old.

Stoke-on-Trent63 homes · 39 over 5y61.9% · median 6.6y Cambridgeshire107 homes · 66 over 5y61.7% · median 6.7y Oxfordshire124 homes · 71 over 5y57.3% · median 6.5y Dudley66 homes · 37 over 5y56.1% · median 6.4y Buckinghamshire101 homes · 56 over 5y55.4% · median 6.5y Shropshire88 homes · 48 over 5y54.5% · median 6.4y Cheshire East91 homes · 49 over 5y53.8% · median 6.4y Devon240 homes · 125 over 5y52.1% · median 6.3y Norfolk246 homes · 128 over 5y52% · median 6.2y Birmingham171 homes · 89 over 5y52% · median 5.7y North Yorkshire154 homes · 80 over 5y51.9% · median 6.3y Gloucestershire140 homes · 68 over 5y48.6% · median 5.2y

Download all 187 councils as CSV

Method

Source: the Care Quality Commission’s Care directory with ratings and Care directory with filters, both dated 4 August 2026, published under the Open Government Licence.

Homes were filtered to the service user band “older people” combined with a care home service type, with or without nursing. Dormant locations were excluded. 447 duplicate registrations were removed — the same home appearing twice under two location IDs, usually following a change of ownership — keeping the record that carried a rating, then the more recent registration.

“Rating age” is the time since the CQC published the rating, not since an inspector visited. The two differ, and the published date is the one displayed to the public.

In fairness to the regulator. The CQC has changed its assessment approach and has been operating a reduced inspection programme. An old rating is not evidence of poor care. Homes providing several services are sometimes rated service by service rather than as a whole, and newly registered homes have not been inspected at all. None of that changes what a family sees when they look a home up.

Both datasets are published in full above. Corrections and questions: tell us.

Check a particular home

Every home on the register has a page here showing its rating, the date it was published, and how old that makes it.

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