Free to use, free to link, free to cite
For professionals
We publish what senior care costs in every American city, the record of every licensed provider we can source, and the ways families pay for it. All of it is free to read, free to link to, and free to cite with attribution. There is no signup, no paywall, and no form standing between a family and a number.
Who this page is for
Area Agency on Aging and ADRC staff answering the cost question on the phone. Hospital discharge planners with two days to arrange care. Hospital and skilled nursing social workers. Long-term care ombudsmen and SHIP counselors. Elder law paralegals. Public librarians whose reference desk gets the same question every week.
The common thread is that you need a defensible local number quickly, from a source you can show a family, and you cannot send them somewhere that will sell their phone number to six sales teams.
The free tools
Six tools, every figure grounded in the same published data as the rest of the site. Each result has its own shareable URL and prints cleanly, so it can be handed over on paper or pasted into an email.
- Cost calculatorPut a real monthly number in front of a family in one screen, for their city and yours, before the first tour.
- Affordability screenerStart from the budget the family actually has, and show which care types that budget reaches locally.
- Caregiver pay estimatorAnswer the question you get weekly, whether a family member can be paid to provide care, with the state program links attached.
- Compare citiesSide by side costs for the move a family is weighing, usually toward an adult child in another state.
- Tour checklistA printable page of questions to ask on a facility tour, useful to hand over at a discharge meeting.
- Care quizThree questions that point a caller toward the right care type to research. Not an assessment and not a diagnosis.
All six sit on the free tools hub. None of them is medical advice, an eligibility determination, or a price quote. Only the agency decides eligibility, and only a provider can quote a price.
Put our numbers on your own page
If linking out is awkward for your site, embed instead. The embed gallery generates one line of code for a city cost table, a city against state against national comparison, a licensed provider count, or a care type cost card. The widget states its own data vintage inside the frame and updates itself when we update the data, so your page does not go stale while nobody is looking at it.
No registration, no tracking script, and no account. Each widget carries one visible attribution link back to the source page. That link is the entire cost to you.
Citing our data
You may quote our figures in a handout, a newsletter, a class, a report, or a resource page. Attribute ElderCareCosts with a visible link to the page the figure came from, and state the date you pulled it, because these numbers move. Every cost page offers Download CSV and Print to PDF for exactly this.
Read how the numbers are built before you cite them. The cost methodology states the hours basis, the survey vintage, and where a local figure is modeled rather than surveyed. Data sources lists every upstream registry, its refresh cadence, and its reuse terms. Underlying CMS and state records remain available from their own publishers, and we cite them rather than claim them.
If you find something wrong, tell us and we will fix it in public. Our corrections policy says how, and editorial standards says what we will and will not publish.
Where to start
Most people on this page want one of two things. If you want the cost figures for your own service area, start at the cost of care hub and pick your care type and state. If you want something to hand a family this afternoon, start at the tools hub.
Contact
Questions about the data, a correction, a citation, or an embed that will not behave: write to [email protected]. A person reads it. If you tell us which counties you serve, we can point you at the exact pages that cover them.