How old are England’s care home ratings?

Of the 13,652 care homes operating in England with a published CQC rating, 8,888 — 65.1% — carry a rating CQC published before 1 Sep 2023, more than three years ago.

Separately, 1,103 operating care homes carry no published overall rating at all. That is a different thing and the two are never added together on this page: a home CQC has not yet inspected is not a home with an old judgement.

What this means when you read one

468 of England’s 624 Outstanding care homes earned that word before 1 Sep 2023.

A rating describes what an inspector found on the day it was published. It does not describe tonight’s staffing, this year’s manager, or whether the home has changed hands since. The older the date, the more of the answer is missing — which is why every rating on this site is shown with the date CQC published it, and why anything three or more years old carries a flag.

This is not a criticism of the regulator

CQC inspects risk-first by design: services where something looks wrong are seen sooner and more often than services where nothing does. A home that has not been re-inspected for four years is, on the whole, a home nobody has been worried about. The point of this page is not that the regulator is failing — it is that a single word published years ago is doing more work in a family’s decision than it can bear, and almost nobody is told the date.

Where you live changes the answer

The national figure hides a wide spread. In Cambridgeshire, 80.8% of rated care homes are judged on an inspection published before 1 Sep 2023; in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole it is 41.9%. Both are real places with real families reading the same word and getting a different amount of information from it.

Only the 40 local authorities with at least 100 rated care homes are listed. Below that count a percentage moves too far on one inspection to mean anything, so those areas are left out rather than published as noise. Every local authority in England, whatever its size, has its own page under areas.

Local authority	Rated care homes	Rating 3+ years old	Share	Not yet rated
Cambridgeshire	125	101	80.8%	15
Gloucestershire	189	147	77.8%	12
Birmingham	250	193	77.2%	27
North Yorkshire	192	147	76.6%	13
Buckinghamshire	118	89	75.4%	13
Sefton	107	80	74.8%	4
Devon	287	214	74.6%	20
Croydon	121	90	74.4%	7
Oxfordshire	127	94	74.0%	19
Cornwall	195	144	73.8%	5
Lancashire	390	287	73.6%	28
Staffordshire	236	173	73.3%	35
Hertfordshire	220	161	73.2%	34
Norfolk	295	214	72.5%	25
County Durham	141	99	70.2%	5
Shropshire	104	72	69.2%	12
Kent	465	320	68.8%	34
Suffolk	172	116	67.4%	24
Hampshire	443	298	67.3%	37
Surrey	348	228	65.5%	43
West Sussex	316	206	65.2%	22
Somerset	186	121	65.1%	11
Kirklees	121	78	64.5%	4
Essex	374	241	64.4%	32
East Sussex	276	176	63.8%	21
East Riding of Yorkshire	135	85	63.0%	16
Derbyshire	224	139	62.1%	19
Nottinghamshire	257	157	61.1%	23
North Northamptonshire	107	65	60.7%	6
Leeds	140	85	60.7%	19
Worcestershire	162	97	59.9%	14
Lincolnshire	264	157	59.5%	19
Leicestershire	152	90	59.2%	11
Wirral	103	60	58.3%	9
Bradford	104	59	56.7%	4
Wiltshire	157	88	56.1%	6
Dorset	106	56	52.8%	12
Sheffield	107	56	52.3%	7
Warwickshire	159	83	52.2%	12
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole	129	54	41.9%	5

Method, and the data

Counts cover locations CQC records as care homes, currently registered and not dormant, in England. “Three or more years old” means the rating’s publication date falls before 1 Sep 2023 — three years before 1 Sep 2026, the date CQC’s own data runs to — the same test that puts the age flag on a rating everywhere else on this site. Where CQC rates a home’s service under a named service group rather than at location level, the home counts with that rating and its own publication date, exactly as its page shows it. Ratings are CQC’s own words; nothing here is re-scored, weighted or averaged into a grade.

Data as published by CQC, 1 Sep 2026. Take the numbers and check them: download the local-authority table as CSV, or read data & methods for every source file and how the artifact is built.

Reading a rating for a specific home? Every service page here shows the rating in CQC’s own words, the date it was published, and the questions worth asking the home directly — because the things a rating cannot cover are the things you can find out in one phone call.

Find care near you · What a CQC rating does and does not tell you