How we rate facilities

We don't. Every rating on this site is the government's, not ours — and the one thing we add is a translation.

There is no Houston Care Compass score

Plenty of senior care sites publish a number they invented. We do not have one. There is no in-house rating, no weighted formula, no editors' pick, and nothing on any page here is a judgment we formed about a facility.

What you see is what two governments published: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the 46 nursing homes on this site, and Texas HHSC licensing records for the 163 assisted living facilities. If a star rating looks wrong to you, it is CMS's rating, and it is wrong in CMS's data too.

The one thing we do add: translation

CMS assigns every nursing home citation a letter from A to L. The letter encodes how serious the failure was and how many residents it touched, and it is published with no explanation at all. A family reading "scope/severity K" has no way to know they are looking at immediate jeopardy — the most serious finding a surveyor can make.

So we decode it. Across the nursing homes published here there are 1000 citations, of which 119 are at immediate jeopardy, spread across 30 facilities. Those are counts of government records, not opinions, and the decoding is a definition of a federal term rather than a view about any facility.

How the A–L grid works

What money cannot do here

These facilities pay a flat monthly advertising fee. Payment does not affect their position in the results below, their ratings, or their inspection history.

Beyond position, 29 fields are sealed against every form of editing, by anyone — an advertiser, a facility owner, or the publisher. A build that tried to change one of them stops rather than producing the page:

• Alzheimer's unit capacity
• complaint-driven citations over 36 months
• every inspection citation
• federal penalties
• fines
• home health star ratings
• hospice family survey results
• license effective date
• license expiration date
• licensed bed capacity
• memory care certification status
• nurse turnover
• registered nurse hours per resident per day
• registered nurse turnover
• special focus facility status
• the Alzheimer's certification number
• the CMS abuse icon
• the CMS certification number
• the health inspection rating
• the long-stay quality rating
• the overall CMS star rating
• the quality-measure rating
• the short-stay quality rating
• the staffing rating
• the state license number
• the state license type
• total citations over 36 months
• total nurse hours per resident per day
• weekend nurse hours per resident per day

That is not a policy anyone has to trust us to keep. It is a list in the source code that the build reads before it writes a page, and the tests fail if a page is produced where it was ignored.

How the order on a page is decided

Facilities are ordered from the government data — and whether a facility advertises is not one of the inputs. The ordering code is not given the commercial fields at all, so there is no setting that could weight them and no way to add one by accident.

A paid slot appears as a labeled block, set apart from the ordinary rows, and the ordinary rows stay in exactly the order they would have been in otherwise. Nothing is promoted, demoted, hidden, or removed because of money.

What a facility can change

Its own contact details, and errors of fact in the license record — which we will correct against the state source, not on request alone. That is the whole list. A facility cannot remove a citation, soften a rating, adjust a fine, or have its inspection history taken down, and neither can we.

If you think something here is wrong

Tell us, and we will show you exactly which government file the figure came from and when it was published. If the underlying record is genuinely wrong, the correction has to be filed with the agency that holds it — CMS or Texas HHSC — because their file is the source and ours is a copy of it.

Inspection findings reflect the date of the survey. They may have been corrected since, and a facility can dispute them through the state's informal dispute resolution process.

Advertising terms · Conflict of interest disclosure · About the publisher

Government data on this site is from the July 2026 release.