Methodology

How we collect prices, and what they cover

Every number on a cost page is a price someone actually charges, either published by a community on its own website or quoted to us directly. We do not model figures or borrow them from a national survey. Below is where the prices come from, and what the sample still misses.

What the prices actually cover

A state license list is the only complete record of which facilities exist. Setting our prices against that list shows how much of a city we have, and how much we do not.

Priced communities as a share of licensed facilities, by metro
Metro Licensed We hold prices for Share
Colorado Springs, CO 73 10 13.7%
Denver, CO 397 37 9.3%

No denominator yet: Phoenix, AZ and Tucson, AZ. Those states have no licensing registry wired into our pipeline yet, so we cannot tell you what share of the market those pages represent. We would rather leave the cell empty than fill it with Colorado's number.

So the number is not what it looks like

In Colorado Springs we hold prices for 13.7% of the licensed facilities, and that is our best covered metro. A page that says "median $5,745" is not telling you the median cost of assisted living in that city. It is telling you the median asking price among the communities that publish one. Those are different numbers, and the wording on our pages should not blur them.

We also know which way it is wrong. 54% of the facilities we are missing have 16 beds or fewer. These are small residential homes, often a converted house. They rarely have a website, they almost never post a rate, and they are usually cheaper than a purpose-built community. Missing them pushes our median up. Every figure here describes the more visible, more expensive end of the market.

Denver shows what that is worth in practice. When we first published it the median was $6,445. Collecting the rest of the sample moved it to $5,745, a $700 drop from coverage alone, with no price changing anywhere.

The rules every page follows

  1. A real price, or nothing

    Each rate is a published base rate or a quote given to us. We record the source URL and the date we saw it. We never take a national average and present it as a local figure.

  2. One vote per community, per room type

    A community advertising four one-bedroom floor plans gets one entry, not four, so a large operator cannot outweigh the rest of the city. Where a community lists a range, we take the starting rate, because that is how it is presented to a family.

  3. Eight communities before a metro publishes

    Below eight separate communities we show the state figure and label it as such. Eight is a floor on whether a distribution can be computed at all. It says nothing about whether eight communities represent a city. The coverage share above is the number that speaks to that, and it is on every cost page.

  4. Stale prices are dropped, not carried

    If an operator dates its own rates and they are more than roughly 18 months old, we leave them out rather than let an old number sit in a current median.

  5. Dated, sourced, un-gated

    Every price carries its collection date and every page carries a last-verified stamp. The full distribution renders before any call to action. There is no email wall and no phone-number wall, on any page, ever.

How the figures are calculated

Median
The middle price, once each community has been reduced to one entry per room type. We lead with the median rather than the mean because a single $12,800 memory-care suite drags an average somewhere no family will recognize.
Typical range
The 25th to 75th percentile, which is the middle half of what we collected. The full minimum and maximum are shown alongside it, never instead of it.
Room-type bands
A room type gets its own band only at three or more prices. Below that it still counts toward the metro index but is not broken out, because a percentile drawn from two numbers tells you nothing.
What the price includes
Base rate: rent, meals, housekeeping, and the standard activity program. It excludes care-level fees, which are assessed per resident and can add several hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. Each cost page shows the care-level tiers separately for that reason.
Collection window
Each metro carries the dates its prices were gathered between. Prices are re-checked on a rolling basis, and the verified stamp only moves when something is actually re-checked.

When we get it wrong

We have already had to pull a number. An earlier version of the Arizona pages cited a statewide Medicaid assisted-living per diem. Arizona does not publish one; we could not source the figure we had used, so we removed it from both live pages rather than leave it up while we looked.

If a price here is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source. [email protected] · Every source we use · Editorial policy

Cost index last verified .