Nursing home ratings in Texas
Medicare-certified nursing homes receive a Five-Star Quality Rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). NursingCareLookup displays those published stars when the CMS file is on hand. We do not assign a rating, average the stars into a “Texas score,” or rerank homes.
What the published stars are
CMS publishes an overall rating and three domain ratings: health inspection, staffing, and quality measures. Each is reported on a one-to-five star scale, or is left unrated when CMS has a footnote instead of a number (for example, when data are insufficient). A blank or footnoted rating is not the same as one star.
The overall rating is produced by CMS from those domains using its own formula, which CMS revises from time to time. This site does not restate that arithmetic. The current method is in the official Five-Star Quality Rating System documentation.
What the domains cover, in brief
- Health inspection. Based on standard surveys and many complaint investigations. A recent serious finding weighs more than a distant, lower-level one, under CMS rules — not under a rule we wrote.
- Staffing. Built from reported nurse staffing hours and related measures CMS includes in the rating. Hours on a facility page, when shown here, come from the same public file. Any Texas average next to those hours is computed on this site from Texas rows in that file; the method is on Methodology.
- Quality measures. Built from clinical quality indicators CMS publishes for short-stay and long-stay residents. They are not the same thing as a survey citation.
What ratings do not tell you
Stars are one public snapshot, updated on CMS’s schedule (the nursing-home files are typically refreshed about once a month). They do not replace a visit, a conversation with staff, or a read of the inspection record. They also do not apply to homes that are licensed in Texas but not Medicare-certified; those homes still appear in this directory and are labeled as such.
“Nursing home compare” and “Five-Star” are CMS and Medicare.gov terms. This site is not a Medicare property and is not affiliated with CMS.
How to use ratings on this site
County and city lists can be sorted by the published overall star, by name, by city, or by citation count. Sorting is not a ranking we created. When the CMS file is missing from an edition, we leave the rating column blank and point you to Medicare.gov.
Special Focus status and abuse icons are separate CMS flags. They are explained on their own page and are not blended into a homemade score.