How we list, and why you can check our work

Aging Well HQ exists because the biggest senior-care websites are paid by facilities, and it shows: gated prices, missing inspection records, and listings limited to whoever pays the referral fee.

Our rules

• Every licensed community is listed. Our Oregon directory is built from the state licensing register — the same public dataset regulators use. A community cannot pay to be added, ranked higher, or have anything hidden.
• Money never changes a listing. No community pays us to be listed or to receive inquiries. If one ever did, that would change where a message is delivered — never what you see, never the order you see it in, and never what we say about anyone.
• Every fact is checkable, and where it cannot be linked we say so. Oregon's license facts link to the official Oregon DHS portal, where inspection reports and substantiated violations are public. Nevada's register publishes no per-community file to link to, so those rows carry the license number as text and nothing more — the number is what you quote when you ask the state for the record. Cost figures cite their published source. If we don't hold a fact — like a community's current prices — we say so instead of guessing.
• Your contact details are never passed around. One inquiry, one community — and it is never copied to a second one. No call centers, no lead lists, no "advisors" working on commission.

What the three labels on our lists mean

Our data is deep in one area and thin in others, so every area of what they need help with carries one of three labels rather than letting you assume. The label is a promise about what this site holds, not about what exists in the world.

Complete list

We list every provider from a public register, in an order nobody can buy. Today that is Oregon's licensed care settings and its licensed in-home care agencies.

Official source

The real list is public and somebody else keeps it current. We explain what it is, what it does and link it, rather than copying it — a stale copy of a public service is worse than a link to the live one. Where we hold a whole register that covers part of the area, we render it and say what it leaves out.

No register exists

Nobody licenses or rates these, so we tell you how to choose and what to check, and never publish a ranking we cannot stand behind. If any link on such a page ever earns us money, it says so on that page, not in a footer.

One label has already been corrected in public, which is the point of writing them down: health and medicine shipped as complete list and was moved to official source the same day, because we hold nothing at all about doctors, pharmacies or dialysis units — pointing at Medicare's list is not holding one.

Check the inspection record before you tour

Every Oregon row here carries a link to that license number's page on Oregon's licensing register: inspection reports, substantiated violations and any regulatory actions, published by the state and refreshed every 24 hours. It's free and needs no account.

About one link in five lands on nothing, and it is worse on the bigger communities. We sampled the portal three times on 2026-08-29, from a total of 190 open Oregon licenses: overall about 20% return "not found". Sampled evenly by license type it is worse where it matters most — roughly 40% of assisted living and 44% of residential care licenses, against 12% of adult foster homes. A plain random sample hides that, because most Oregon licenses are foster homes. The license is real and current in the state's own export; the portal simply has no detail page at that address. We have not worked out why yet, and until we do the honest thing is to publish the measurement rather than let a dead link look like a check you performed. If one does not open, search the portal by the community's name; the record is usually there under a different address. Nevada publishes no equivalent per-community file at all, so a Nevada row gives you the license number to quote rather than a link to follow. Both differences are the states', not ours, and they are the reason we say which register each page is built from.

Do it before you visit, not after. A tour is a good way to judge whether a place feels right and a poor way to learn how it is run — you're seeing the building at its calmest hour, guided by someone whose job is to show it well. The inspection history is the part a visit can't show you, and it's already public.

Two things worth knowing when you read one. A finding is not automatically a red flag — size, license type and how many complaints a place attracts all push the count around, and a large community will usually have more entries than a five-bed adult foster home. And an empty record isn't automatically reassuring: independent living isn't licensed as care in Oregon, so those communities have no inspection file at all. That silence is not a clean record and it is also not an absence of oversight: where a community is a registered continuing care community, Oregon requires the state to answer a resident's complaint within 14 days and to finish investigating within 90 — but the findings go to the provider and the person who complained, never to the public. So the record is unpublished rather than empty, which is a different thing to tell you. We say the same on our independent living pages.

How the maps are drawn, and what the distances mean

Every area page has a map of the communities on it. We draw it ourselves, from data we hold, and that is a deliberate choice with a cost attached: it looks plainer than a Google or Mapbox map because it is not one. An ordinary web map works by your browser fetching picture tiles from another company's servers, which tells that company your address and which page you were reading when you asked — and on this site, that page is where you are thinking of moving your parent. We would rather have the plainer map.

You can drag the map, zoom it, and point at a dot to see which community it is. Where several communities sit close together they are drawn as one circle with a count in it; zoom in and they separate. All of that runs on your own device, on the same geometry the page already carries — nothing is fetched from anyone else while you move around.

The town names, highways and rivers on it come from the US Census Bureau's TIGER files, which are public records. They are there so you can tell whether a dot is in your mother's neighborhood or forty minutes away, and they stop where usefulness does: the map carries the interstates and the main highways and nothing below them, so it will not show you a street. We did not want it implying detail we do not hold.

Three things worth knowing about what you are looking at.

• The dots come from a street address, not a survey. We send each community's address, exactly as the state register gives it, to the US Census Bureau's geocoder. Most match a building. Some match only the street, and those are drawn hollow — good to about a block, no better. A few addresses it cannot place at all: those communities have no dot, and each map says how many. They are still in the table, because the table is the list.
• Distances are straight lines. When you give us a ZIP code or let your browser share your location, we work out the distance in a straight line from there to each community. That is not a drive. A home four miles away across the Columbia, or over a ridge, can be forty minutes. What we would rather show you is drive time, and we cannot: working it out means asking a routing company for every row, which is the same third-party request we just said we would not make. Straight-line distance is honest about being a rough ordering, and we would rather give you that than pretend to a number we would have to buy.
• Nothing you type here leaves your browser. The list of ZIP code locations is already inside the page, so looking one up is arithmetic on your own device. If you use the browser's own location instead, we use it to sort the list and write it nowhere — which is also why it is gone when you close the tab, and why the link to that page does not carry it. A ZIP code does travel in the link, so you can send a narrowed list to your brother.

The county outlines are simplified to draw at the size of a page and are not a boundary of record; the hospital crosses are Medicare-certified hospitals with an emergency department, from the CMS hospital file, and the distance to one is a straight line too — not an ambulance ride.

Corrections: nearly everything here is copied from a state or federal register, so the fastest fix is at the source — the state data refreshes daily and we re-import on a schedule, and a correction made there reaches these pages within a day. There is no contact form on this site today; the only form is the one that asks a question about a single community, and it does not reach us as a correction.