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How to find out who owns a nursing home
The ownership of every Medicare-certified nursing home in the United States is public information. It is also scattered across three government systems, published as raw CSV, and structured in a way that hides the answer most people are looking for. Here is how to get it.
The short answer
Search the facility on Medicare's Care Compare for the licensed operator, then pull the CMS "All Owners" file to see every entity with a stake — including the ones that do not appear on any sign. The catch is that CMS lists those entities separately with nothing linking them.
Step 1 — find the facility's CCN
The CMS Certification Number is the key that connects every federal dataset about a facility. Care Compare shows it on the facility profile.
Step 2 — pull the ownership filing
CMS publishes "All Owners" files for nursing homes, home health agencies and hospices. Each row is one owner: an organisation or an individual, with a role code, an association date and sometimes an ownership percentage. They are free, and linked on our methodology page.
Step 3 — the part that defeats most people
One facility routinely lists eight to fifteen owners: a property entity, an operating entity, a management company, a therapy company, a holding company above those, and individuals above that. In our data the most fragmented single operator files under 40 separate legal entities while controlling 51 facilities. Nothing in the CMS file says they are related.
That is the gap this site exists to close: we group entities whose facility portfolios overlap into one corporate family, so you can see the operator rather than the paperwork.
Step 4 — check whether it recently changed hands
The CMS change-of-ownership file records the buyer, the seller and the effective date. A facility that changed owners in the last 18 months often has a compliance record that belongs to somebody else.
Common questions
Is nursing home ownership public information?
Yes. CMS publishes ownership filings for every Medicare-certified nursing home, home health agency and hospice, free and in the public domain.
Why does one nursing home have so many owners?
Operators commonly separate property, operations, management and therapy into different legal entities, often one per facility. CMS records each separately.
Can I find out if a private equity firm owns a nursing home?
Partly. CMS enrollment includes a private-equity checkbox, but it is self-reported and widely considered an undercount, particularly where ownership sits behind holding companies.