About CareCost Compass
A plain answer to the question people actually ask: what will this cost, and is the place any good?
What this site is
CareCost Compass publishes two kinds of thing, and they are built differently on purpose. The first is cost information: what assisted living, memory care, nursing homes, independent living, and in-home care cost nationally and in each state. The second is a directory of every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States, built from the federal registry that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes.
It exists because the numbers people need before a decision are scattered across press releases, survey PDFs, and government datasets that are hard to read. Assembling them once, in public, with the method shown, is more useful than another article that repeats a rounded figure without saying where it came from.
Who runs it
CareCost Compass is operated by CCC Operations. It is an independent publication: not a care provider, not a placement agency, not affiliated with CMS, and not owned by anyone who sells care. Corrections go to hello@carecostcompass.com and are made on the page, with the change noted.
How the numbers are made
Every figure on this site carries one of two labels, and the label is the promise:
- Survey — a published figure, cited at the point of use. National assisted living, memory care, independent living, and in-home rates come from A Place for Mom's 2026 cost data; nursing home medians and the non-medical hourly rate come from the CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey; every state's assisted living average is published, not estimated.
- Modeled — calculated, and said so. State-level figures other than assisted living are derived by scaling the national figure by that state's assisted living cost. The formula is printed on the sources and method page, along with the reasons it is an approximation.
Facility data is not modeled at all. Star ratings, staffing hours, turnover, deficiencies, fines, and the abuse and Special Focus Facility flags are reproduced exactly as CMS publishes them. Where CMS has not published a value, the page shows a dash rather than a zero.
What it does not claim
These are averages. No two residents pay the same price, and a quote from a specific community beats any figure here. Star ratings are a regulatory composite, not a consumer review: a five-star nursing home is not automatically the right home for a particular person, and a two-star home may be the only one within visiting distance. Nothing here is medical, legal, or financial advice.
How it is funded
Today, it is not. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement, and no paid placement anywhere on the site, and no care provider can pay to appear in or improve a position in the directory. What that would look like if it changes is set out in the disclosure page.
Page last reviewed: 2026-10-18