How We Rank Care Homes: Our Method and Sources

This page is the editorial team at MyCareCheck explaining, in our own words, how the lists on this site are put together. We help families find a care home in England and we want you to know exactly what we do and what we leave to others.

We did not inspect any of these homes

Every rating you see here was given by the Care Quality Commission, the regulator for health and adult social care in England. We take its published register and ratings and put them in an order that makes a search easier, by council, by town, by kind of care and by the company that runs the home.

What we add is the arrangement. A family looking for dementia care in Bolton should not have to read through every home in the north west, so each kind of care has its own list inside each council area, and each list says what that kind of home is registered to do.

Every grade is shown, the poor ones included

Our lists carry all 14,783 homes in the register data we hold, from Outstanding to Inadequate, and the homes the regulator has not yet rated. A home's grade sits on its card whatever its place in the list, and nothing a home does with its page can remove or soften it.

We think a family choosing for someone they love needs the whole picture, and a weak result is part of it. A list that quietly dropped the homes with problems would look tidier and tell you less.

Why one home sits above another

The order is editorial and rests on the regulator's findings, read in three ways. First, what the home is registered to do, so a nursing home appears in the nursing lists and a home registered for dementia appears in the dementia ones. Second, what the CQC found, taking all five of its key questions together and the date of the report, so a home with strong results across the board goes ahead of one with a weak spot. Third, what the home tells you about itself, such as how to reach it, its website and the provider behind it.

Homes without a rating come after the rated ones and say so. We review the order from time to time, and we reload the CQC data regularly. The CQC data on our lists was loaded on 2 November 2026.

What a home can pay for, and what it can't

Being listed is free for every home the CQC registers. A home that is already in a list can choose Pro, a fuller page where it adds its own photographs, services and details, or Top, one of the three first places in a list, always marked as Top.

Neither buys a better grade, a kinder report or a way in for a home we would not list. Pro does not move a home up, and the CQC rating stays beside every card whatever it pays.

If something looks wrong, tell us

Ratings and report dates are the CQC's, so if a grade looks out of date, open the home's page on the CQC site first, because it may have published a newer report than our last load. Details a home controls, such as its phone number, website or services, can be corrected by the home itself, free of charge, after it claims its page.

Anyone can write to info@mycarecheck.co.uk with a correction. If the mistake is ours we fix it and say so. If it sits in the register, we tell you where to report it.

Last reviewed by the MyCareCheck editorial team on 12 November 2026.