Last Updated on September 17, 2026
Every registered care home in England has a public profile on cqc.org.uk. Search by name or postcode, free, no login. You will see one of four ratings: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate, plus the date it was awarded. Check that date. Ratings can be years old.
Checked on 11 September 2026.
This guide covers England only. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates health and social care in England. In Scotland the regulator is the Care Inspectorate, in Wales it is Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW), and in Northern Ireland it is the RQIA. If the home is outside England, its record is on one of those registers, not CQC’s.
The register at a glance
| Question | Answer (checked 11 September 2026) |
|---|---|
| Register | CQC public register of care services, cqc.org.uk |
| Run by | Care Quality Commission, the regulator for England |
| Cost to check | Free, no account needed |
| Ratings | Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement, Inadequate |
| Rated on | Five key questions: safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led |
| Rating age | No fixed reinspection schedule. The award date is shown on the profile |
| Must the home display it? | Yes, by law, at the premises and on its website if it has one |
| Covers | England only |
What a CQC rating proves
The rating is the regulator’s published judgement of the service at its last assessment. CQC says it normally gives a rating for each of its five key questions, whether the service is “safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led”, plus an overall rating.
A profile on cqc.org.uk also proves the home is registered at all. Providing regulated care in England without CQC registration is illegal, so a home that does not appear on the register is a serious problem, not an admin gap.
What it does not prove
A rating is not a review. It tells you nothing about the food this month, the fees, the activities, or whether the staff who impressed the inspector still work there.
It is also not a live score. CQC’s own assessment page says its methods determine “how often we will assess, gather evidence and reach ratings”. There is no promise of an annual visit. A home rated Good in 2022 has a 2022 judgement, not a 2026 guarantee. That is why the inspection date matters as much as the rating word.
And a rating is not a recommendation from Whito or anyone else. Whito is not a regulator. We publish how to read the regulator’s register, nothing more.
The two-minute check
- Go to cqc.org.uk/care-services. The search takes a service name or specialism (optional) and a location and distance (optional), with a radius of 5 to 25 miles. Set the service type to care homes.
- Search the home’s name. If nothing comes up, search the postcode and look through the list. Homes sometimes trade under a different name from their registered one.
- Open the profile. Read the overall rating and the ratings for the five key questions. Note the date next to the rating and the date of the latest report. A rating from several years ago deserves less weight than one from last spring.
- Check the registered provider named on the profile against the name on the brochure, website or contract. The company you would be paying should match, or clearly connect to, the registered provider.
- Look for any enforcement notes or a statement that the service is in special measures, and open the latest inspection report itself. The report says why the rating is what it is.
Total time, about two minutes. Longer if you read the full report, which is worth doing before you sign anything.
Enforcement and special measures
Where care falls short, CQC has harder tools than the rating alone. Its published enforcement options include “requirement notices or warning notices to set out what improvements the care provider must make and by when”, changing a provider’s registration “for example by imposing conditions”, and “placing a provider in special measures, where we closely supervise the quality of care while working with other organisations to help them improve”. It can also issue cautions and fines, and prosecute “where people are harmed or placed in danger”.
Any of this on a profile is a flag to read the latest report closely and ask the home directly what has changed since.
The display rule
Providers are required by law to display their ratings “in the places where they provide care, somewhere that people who use their services can easily see them”, and on their website if they have one. So the rating should be visible in the entrance area and on the home’s site.
For operators: display the rating and link your CQC profile from your website. Families check the register anyway. A home that shows its rating and its latest report date looks like it has nothing to hide, because it does not.
Red flags
- No rating displayed at the premises or on the website. Display is a legal requirement. Ask why it is missing.
- The brochure name does not match the registered provider. Trading names are legal, but you should be able to trace the company you are contracting with to the CQC registration. If nobody at the home can explain the link, stop.
- “That was under old management.” New owners and managers can improve a home, but the register shows what was found and when. Ask for the date of the change and check whether CQC has assessed the service since. An Inadequate rating does not disappear because the letterhead changed.
- A rating quoted with no date. “Rated Good by CQC” from an inspection many years ago is technically true and practically stale. Check the date on the profile yourself.
- The home is not on the register at all. Do not proceed until you understand why.
What this page does not cover
- Care home fees, top-ups, and what councils pay.
- NHS continuing healthcare and funding routes.
- How to choose between two adequately rated homes. That is a visit-in-person job.
- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which have their own regulators and rating systems.
Method and limits
We checked CQC’s search page, ratings page, assessment framework page and enforcement page live on 11 September 2026, and quoted only wording we saw on those pages. We did not review any individual care home. Nothing here is legal advice, and Whito has no connection to CQC. Where CQC changes its framework or page wording, the register itself is the source of truth.
Sources
- CQC: find and compare care services. The search interface: name or specialism, location and distance, service type.
- CQC: our ratings. The four rating levels and the legal display requirement.
- CQC: how we assess. The five key questions and the absence of a fixed reinspection timetable.
- CQC: taking action. Warning notices, conditions, special measures, fines and prosecution.
Before you go
Check how visible your business is. The free Whito Visibility Check runs seventeen automated checks on what search engines and AI assistants can see on your homepage. Seventeen checks, about twenty seconds, no email, no sales call. Run the free Visibility Check.
List your business free. The Whito directory is free to join and free to stay in. Nobody can pay to appear, and nobody can pay to move up. Add your listing.
More guides for care homes: Whito’s care homes hub.
Related research: UK Care Homes 2026: the register gap and who AI names. Whito’s September 2026 study found 6,768 of England’s 14,892 registered care homes, 45.5%, have no website recorded on the CQC file, and of 12 CQC ratings stated by Google AI across 20 town searches, three did not match the regulator’s file.
Looking for a care home instead of running one? Search the free directory: /find/.
