Data sources

Every figure on this site comes from a public CMS file. We apply no editorial adjustments to the underlying data — the grade is a computation over it, not a revision of it.

Release date, not load date

The dates above are the dates CMS published each file, not the dates we loaded them. Those are different, sometimes by months, and treating the load date as freshness overstates how current the information is. A survey conducted in April does not become current because we refreshed our database in July.

Known gap: freshness dates elsewhere on the site do not yet resolve from this table. Facility pages show the date we loaded the record, which is later than the date CMS published the underlying survey data and is labelled as a load date for that reason. The dates on this page are the ones to rely on.

What we do not yet use

CMS publishes several files we do not currently ingest, including Payroll-Based Journal daily staffing, MDS quality measures, and civil money penalties. We would rather name that gap than imply coverage we do not have. Nothing on this site is derived from those files today.

Reproducing our numbers

The files above are public and free. Combined with the published formula, they are sufficient to reproduce every grade we display. If you do that and get a different answer, we would like to know — tell us.