What CQC ratings mean

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. It inspects services and publishes a rating for them. We show its ratings exactly as it publishes them. We do not change them, combine them or add a score of our own.

The ratings

CQC uses four ratings. Each one has a meaning:

• Outstanding

  The service is performing exceptionally well.

• Good

  The service is performing well and meeting expectations.

• Requires improvement

  The service is not performing as well as it should.

• Inadequate

  The service is performing badly.

• Insufficient evidence to rate

  There was not enough evidence to give a rating.

Each rating comes with a word and a symbol, so you never have to rely on colour to tell them apart.

The five key questions

CQC looks at every service through five questions, and gives a rating for each one. It also gives an overall rating.

• Is it safe?
• Is it effective?
• Is it caring?
• Is it responsive to people’s needs?
• Is it well-led?

Why a rating can be old

CQC does not inspect every service every year. A rating can stay in place for several years until the next inspection. We always show when each rating was published, and how long ago that was, so you can judge for yourself. A service can change a lot in that time, so it is always worth visiting and asking questions as well.

Ratings carried over

Sometimes CQC carries a rating over from a service’s earlier registration, for example when a new provider takes over. We say so on the service page when this has happened, because the service may not have been inspected under its current registration yet.

When there is no overall rating

Some services show “No overall rating shown”. That does not mean CQC has not looked at them. CQC sometimes rates a place in parts, for example for each type of care it provides or each group of people it supports, rather than giving one overall rating. Other services have not been rated yet. Where CQC publishes a rating for each part, such as “Homecare: Good”, we show those ratings as they are published, one for each part. We never add them together into an overall rating of our own. The CQC website has the full picture, and every service page links to it.

What a rating cannot tell you

• How a service feels day to day, or whether it is right for the person you are choosing for.
• Whether there is a place free, or how much it costs.
• Anything that has happened since the date of the rating.

Our guide to choosing care suggests questions to ask.

Find out more

How CQC rates services (CQC website)

To see where our information comes from and how up to date it is, read where our data comes from.