How old are England’s care home ratings?

Of the 13,652 care homes operating in England with a published CQC rating, 9,029 — 66.1%— carry a rating CQC published before 22 Jul 2023, more than three years ago.

Separately, 1,121 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

473 of England’s 616 Outstanding care homes earned that word before 22 Jul 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, 84.0% of rated care homes are judged on an inspection published before 22 Jul 2023; in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole it is 43.8%. 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	105	84.0%	16
Buckinghamshire	120	95	79.2%	14
North Yorkshire	189	148	78.3%	16
Gloucestershire	188	147	78.2%	12
Oxfordshire	128	97	75.8%	19
Birmingham	251	189	75.3%	25
Devon	290	218	75.2%	20
Hertfordshire	220	164	74.5%	34
Norfolk	297	221	74.4%	24
Croydon	121	90	74.4%	7
Cornwall	196	144	73.5%	4
Lancashire	389	282	72.5%	30
Staffordshire	235	170	72.3%	32
County Durham	142	102	71.8%	4
Shropshire	104	74	71.2%	13
Sefton	107	76	71.0%	4
Kent	468	332	70.9%	32
East Sussex	272	187	68.8%	23
Surrey	348	238	68.4%	39
West Sussex	317	214	67.5%	23
Hampshire	440	297	67.5%	39
Derbyshire	225	148	65.8%	19
Kirklees	119	77	64.7%	6
Essex	372	240	64.5%	33
North Northamptonshire	107	69	64.5%	6
Suffolk	171	110	64.3%	25
Lincolnshire	261	167	64.0%	23
Somerset	187	119	63.6%	10
Wirral	103	64	62.1%	7
Nottinghamshire	257	159	61.9%	19
East Riding of Yorkshire	135	83	61.5%	16
Leicestershire	152	93	61.2%	10
Worcestershire	161	98	60.9%	16
Leeds	139	83	59.7%	19
Wiltshire	159	93	58.5%	6
Warwickshire	158	88	55.7%	15
Bradford	104	57	54.8%	5
Sheffield	106	57	53.8%	9
Dorset	107	57	53.3%	13
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole	130	57	43.8%	6

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 22 Jul 2023— three years before this data was exported — the same test that puts the age flag on a rating everywhere else on this site. Ratings are CQC’s own words; nothing here is re-scored, weighted or averaged into a grade.

Data as published by CQC, 2026-07-08. 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