How we measured California assisted living capacity

This is the method behind How many assisted living facilities are in California?.

The study uses the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) statewide licensing download as of October 2, 2026, its annual facility and capacity report and the Census Bureau’s county population estimates for July 1, 2025. The download and the annual report give different totals; the last section sets them side by side.

The licensing download

The main source is the download of Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly (RCFE), California’s license category for assisted living, from CDSS’s facility search, taken on October 2, 2026, with 13,257 rows. The file marks each row LICENSED, ON PROBATION, PENDING or CLOSED.

The count is the licenses on file that day, not records the state confirmed on that date.

Inclusion and exclusion

We include RESIDENTIAL CARE ELDERLY and RCFE-CONTINUING CARE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY rows whose status is LICENSED. Each facility number appears once, so each row is one facility. Every included facility has a capacity above zero and a California address.

ON PROBATION is its own status, not a revoked license; the study counts LICENSED only. Adding the 23 facilities on probation and their 1,495 places would make 8,589 facilities and 213,686 places.

Capacity is the Facility Capacity field added across the included facilities. The continuing-care row counts only the places a campus licenses as an RCFE, not its independent-living apartments or nursing beds.

Size bands

No facility is left out for its size. We group facilities into six bands: 1–3, 4–6, 7–10, 11–49, 50–99 and 100 or more; the study’s table shows the first two as one six-or-fewer row. The bands are our groupings, not California license classes: they describe scale and do not establish staffing, services, price or quality.

California’s residential-use rule applies to facilities serving six or fewer people; our six-or-fewer row is a capacity band and does not say whether a home meets that rule.

The table shows how much of the study’s capacity sits in facilities with at least 7, 11 or 16 places.

Assigning the counties

Each facility’s county comes from the County Name field in the download, checked against the county in CDSS’s map file. The two disagree for 18 included facilities.

For 17 of them, the Census Bureau’s address lookup settles the county. For the one address it cannot place, we use the county where CDSS’s map puts the facility, Ventura. That facility has 63 places. Counting it in Los Angeles instead, as the download does, would move Los Angeles’s rate from 63.1 to 63.2 places per 1,000 residents aged 75 or older, and Ventura’s from 88.7 to 87.8.

Every facility lands in one of California’s 58 counties. The nine counties with no licensed facility stay in the table with zero facilities and zero places; zero means no licensed assisted living there, not no care of any kind. Rates describe counties as a whole; they do not show distance from a person’s home or differences within a county.

Population, rates and withheld counties

We use the Census Bureau’s county population estimates for July 1, 2025 (Vintage 2025, released June 2026) and add each county’s residents aged 75 to 79, 80 to 84, and 85 and older. Across the 58 counties that is 3,031,385 people aged 75 or older. A county’s rate is its capacity divided by that population, times 1,000; we round only the displayed figure, to one decimal.

The rate pairs the July 1, 2025 population with the October 2, 2026 download as they stand, without projecting population forward. We use people aged 75 or older as the comparison group; it is not an age rule for assisted living or a count of people looking for it.

We withhold a county’s rate when fewer than 1,000 of its residents are aged 75 or older: Alpine (128), Mono (913) and Sierra (474), none of which has a licensed facility. In the study’s county tables, the rate cell reads “No facility” for every county without a licensed facility: Alpine, Colusa, Inyo, Mariposa, Modoc, Mono, Plumas, Sierra and Trinity. The county file keeps a rate of 0.0 for the other six and leaves the cell blank for the three withheld rates. The state rate is 70.0, computed from the statewide sums rather than an average of county rates.

Rankings use the unrounded rates. Charts start at zero. The figures are counts of licensed places from state records, not a survey, so they carry no margin of error and say nothing about empty beds.

The annual report, 2017 to 2026

CDSS’s Facility and Capacity Data 2017–26 report gives a June count for each year from 2017 to 2026. We add its RCFE and continuing-care (CCRC-RCFE) rows for each year; the report’s program rows add up to its printed total in every year. Between June 2021 and June 2026, licensed capacity rose 6.8% and the number of facilities rose 11.2%.

The annual report’s June 2026 total is 8,442 facilities and 212,609 places; the download’s LICENSED count is 8,566 and 212,191, which is 124 more facilities and 418 fewer places. The two sources use different dates and selection rules, and the download also picks up corrections and category changes, so the gap is not a count of openings, closures or lost beds.

Sources and downloads. Download the county data, size bands, status table and annual series. Sources: the CDSS licensing download, its map file, annual facility and capacity report and glossary, the Census Bureau’s county population estimates, file layout and address lookup, and California’s RCFE definition and six-or-fewer rule.