Sterling Commons

The Inspection Grade is a proprietary Assisted Living Magazine score — a 0–100 score (shown as a letter) of a facility's regulatory inspection record, compared with other assisted living residences in California. Each category below contributes a weighted share — ranking better than the typical facility in your state raises the grade, worse lowers it. Serious problems weigh more than clean marks, so one severe issue costs more than a good record earns.

It is not a government rating. CMS and state health agencies publish the underlying inspection records; the grade is our own calculation from them, and no regulator endorses or reviews it.

• Serious citations 42%

  How often inspectors cite the facility for the state's most serious category of citations — the ones that put a resident at immediate risk — measured per inspection.

• Moderate citations 32%

  How often inspectors cite the facility for the state's lower-severity citations, measured per inspection.

• Complaint visits 26%

  How often regulators visited the facility to look into a complaint, measured per 100 resident beds. One complaint can take several visits, and a visit is an allegation being checked — not a finding against the facility.

Not every facility is graded on the same categories. A facility is scored only on the categories we have verified data for, and which exist at all depends on what its regulator publishes. CMS-certified nursing homes carry federal records for four. State-regulated facilities — assisted living and adult care — are graded on what their own state publishes: here that is the categories shown above, since this state classifies its own citations by severity and publishes a complaint register. Fines and problem-resolution data are collected only at the federal level, so they are never part of a state facility's grade. A grade can even rest on a single category when that's the only inspection data on record; it reflects what we actually know, and a facility is never penalized for data that simply doesn't exist for it.

The period we look at. Where a state publishes its own inspection record, the grade follows that record and the period the state reports on. Where we grade from inspection reports we have read ourselves, the grade covers the last five years. CMS-certified nursing homes are graded on the current records CMS publishes. Either way, old findings age out: a facility isn't judged forever on a problem it has long since fixed.

Data quality. We weigh every category by how much verified data we actually have — federal CMS inspection records count fully, a state's own published record counts nearly as much, and reports read by our AI count for less. When a record is thin, we grade more cautiously and won't publish a damaging grade we can't stand behind.

Severe events. A recent, verified severe event — immediate jeopardy, substantiated abuse, or a license / Medicare termination — can cap the grade regardless of the rest.

The scale. It's set so a typical facility lands around a B+. Most homes are fine; C, D, or F is a genuine warning flag worth a closer look.