How to read these records

The ownership file is a disclosure form, not a summary of who owns what. Reading it correctly takes a few minutes and avoids the mistakes that experienced readers make regularly.

Figures on this page are derived from the batch processed 2026-09-12, the same batch every other page on this site is built from. They move when CMS publishes a new one.

Ways these records are misread

1. A role is not an ownership stake

Federal law requires a facility to disclose its owners, its officers and directors, its managing employees, and the parties it contracts with. Lenders, accounting firms, and management companies are all disclosable, and they appear in the same column as equity holders. The role column is the only thing that separates them.

Two of the largest footprints in the current batch make the point, with the roles CMS filed, in the file's own words.

FORVIS MAZARS LLP appears at 291 facilities in 25 states:

• ADP OF THE SNF at 283
• OPERATIONAL/MANAGERIAL CONTROL at 79
• 5% OR GREATER DIRECT OWNERSHIP INTEREST at 10

CIBC BANK USA appears at 195 facilities in 26 states:

• 5% OR GREATER SECURITY INTEREST at 106
• OPERATIONAL/MANAGERIAL CONTROL at 82
• ADP OF THE SNF at 72
• 5% OR GREATER MORTGAGE INTEREST at 49
• 5% OR GREATER DIRECT OWNERSHIP INTEREST at 9
• 5% OR GREATER INDIRECT OWNERSHIP INTEREST at 1

The mix is the lesson. Most of a large footprint can be contracted, advisory, or lending roles while the same name holds a disclosed ownership interest at a handful of facilities, so there is no correct label for the party, only the role disclosed at each facility. Sorting the ownership file by how often a name appears produces a list of the most frequently disclosed parties, which is a different question from who operates the most facilities.

2. Names are exact strings, not entities

Names on this site group by the exact characters CMS published. Related filings often arrive under several spellings, and nothing here merges them, because merging would assert that two filings describe one entity. The file does not say that, so this site does not either.

In the current batch each of these names is filed separately:

Whether they are one organization is a question this file does not answer. Adding their facility counts together assumes an answer. Reading each as filed does not.

3. The same name, a different role at each facility

A name is not disclosed once. It is disclosed once per facility, with a role each time, and the roles differ. The same person can hold an ownership interest at a handful of facilities and be a managing employee at a hundred others. For the individuals the file names, the correct reading is per building, and the current batch shows how often that matters.

The current batch has 137 distinct name strings filed with owner type Individual and disclosed at 50 or more facilities. Of those, 78 hold no role whose published description contains the words ownership interest anywhere in the file. 59 hold such a role somewhere, and 57 of those hold it at only some of their facilities. A single label applied to any of them would be wrong at some of the buildings the name is attached to. These are counts of exact published names, not of people.

This site takes the role from the row, so a name shown on a facility page carries the role disclosed at that facility. The glossary lists every role value CMS defines, and the file sometimes publishes a value the dictionary does not define; the glossary marks those as published without a definition.

4. These are filings, not findings

CMS publishes what facilities and their disclosed parties filed. It does not independently verify them. A gap in the file is a gap in what was filed, and a layered structure is the structure as disclosed. The checksums on the Data page prove this site matches what CMS published. They say nothing about whether a filing matches the world.

5. The record is a snapshot, not a history

This site serves the current batch and nothing older. CMS overwrites the published file each month, so the record you read today is the record as filed now, not as it stood on the date an event happened. The monthly history exists, kept by CMS itself: an archive of month-end snapshots, one download per month, at data.cms.gov/provider-data/archived-data/nursing-homes. A month-end snapshot is the file as it stood when the month closed, which is not the same as its state on a particular day. The batch history on the Data page answers a different question: it proves what this site served and when, not what CMS published.

The questions readers arrive with, and where each is answered

Who is connected to this facility?

The facility page lists every disclosed party with the role filed for it, and the full record tabs carry the citation, penalty, and survey rows as published. It does not say which party controls the facility.

Where else does this name appear?

The Ownership search matches every word you type against the published names, so JOHN MITCHELL finds MITCHELL, JOHN, and spellings that share text turn up in the same search. Each result is one published name, exactly as CMS spelled it, listed with the facilities it is disclosed at and counts computed over the full file. Nothing tells you whether two spellings are the same party.

What does my state look like?

Each state page lists its certified facilities with the ratings CMS published. It does not rank them beyond the sort you choose, and the sort keys are the published columns.

Does this record match what I was told?

Every table names its source file, CMS dataset, and modified date, so a figure can be traced to the file it came from. It cannot tell you which account is correct when they differ.

Give me the underlying data.

The Data page publishes the original CMS files unmodified, with checksums and the batch history. Nothing on this site is derived in a way the originals cannot reproduce.

What the record cannot tell you

The About page covers the limits of this site. These are limits of the file itself, and they hold no matter who republishes it.

• It does not say who owns the building. The operator and the property owner are frequently different parties, and the disclosure covers the operator side.
• It does not say what anyone was paid. No amounts, no cost reports, no margins appear in this file.
• It does not say whether two similar names are related. That is the same boundary as the exact-strings trap, stated as a property of the record rather than of this site.

Where this file stops, other public records continue. Property ownership is recorded by the county that assesses it, and corporate registration by the state that grants it. Those are separate records maintained by separate offices, and reaching them is a step a reader takes deliberately, about a question they already have. This site links to none of them and attaches none of them to any name, for the reason given on About: a matching name string is not a matching party.