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Where our data comes from

Sources, licences and how up to date the information is.

Care Quality Commission (England)

Information about services in England comes from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and adult social care. We use only adult social care services: care homes, home care, supported living, extra care housing and Shared Lives.

Contains Care Quality Commission data © Care Quality Commission, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Care Comparison is independent and is not connected to or endorsed by CQC.

Postcodes and places

When you search, we use postcodes.io to turn the postcode or place you type into a position on the map. It receives only what you typed, not anything that identifies you.

Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How fresh is it?

Every service shows a “data as at” date, which is the date of the CQC information we last loaded for it, and a link to see the service on the CQC website. We load CQC’s full monthly files, and between them we check CQC’s list of changes several times a day, so most changes appear within a day. Inspection dates come from CQC and are updated weekly. A rating can be several years old: we always show the date it was published beside it. Earlier ratings and links to CQC’s reports come from CQC too. CQC is the best place to check the very latest.

How we show ratings

Ratings are shown exactly as the regulator publishes them, in their own words. We never convert one regulator’s ratings into another’s scheme, and we never combine them into a score of our own. Other parts of the UK will be added one regulator at a time, each with its own scheme.

What we leave out

  • Fees, vacancies and availability: there is no reliable free official source.
  • Reviews or comments from the public.
  • The CQC logo. It is not covered by the Open Government Licence.

Found a mistake?

If something on a service page looks wrong, check it against the regulator first, then tell us at [email protected]. We cannot change what a regulator publishes, but we can fix how we show it.