Care Rating Percentile Tool
Enter a CMS overall star rating and choose a state. We compare the rating against that state's average and the national average across all 50 states using PlainElderCare's CMS Care Compare snapshot, returning a percentile band and tier label.
How CMS computes the overall star rating
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Five-Star Quality Rating System combines three separate measures: Health Inspections, Staffing, and Quality Measures. The Overall Rating starts with the Health Inspection star rating, then adjusts up or down by Staffing and Quality Measures stars.
Roughly, the national distribution skews so that 1- and 5-star facilities each sit near 20% of the universe, with 2-, 3-, and 4-star bands filling the remaining ~60%. This tool returns an approximation of where a single rating sits in the distribution, then compares it against the state-level average from PlainElderCare's snapshot.
Limitations
- State averages are facility-weighted (not bed-weighted) means.
- Percentile bands are heuristic ranges, not the exact quintile breakpoints CMS publishes quarterly.
- Ratings change as inspections roll forward, re-check Care Compare for the live number.
PlainElderCare is rendered directly from CMS Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare, and the CareScout Cost of Care Survey, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Primary sources: CMS Care Compare and CareScout Cost of Care Survey.