CQC Care Home Inspection Reports & Homecare API

Preparing a care-provider review? Collect CQC report links, publication dates and available ratings for care homes and homecare services in England, grouped by provider and ready to export to a spreadsheet.

$0.01 per provider returned, plus Apify platform usage. A provider with several matching locations is charged once in that run. No CQC API key, DataForSEO account or paid data subscription is required. Free Apify accounts can run the Actor within their normal platform limits.

This is an independent public-data tool, not a CQC service or endorsement. It finds and organises published metadata; it does not assess care quality, extract clinical findings or produce a commercial lead score.

Choose the right search

Mode	Use it when	Important coverage limit
LOOKUP	You already know the CQC location IDs to review.	Fetches the public pages at run time, but does not reconstruct a complete inspection history.
DISCOVERY	You want a filtered shortlist from CQC's latest-ratings publication.	Starts from a monthly snapshot, not a complete daily feed of newly published reports.

Check freshness before using the results. CQC says its API and website are updated daily, but the ratings spreadsheet used for discovery is normally monthly. CQC also warns that its system migration can delay updates. Every result includes source and coverage information; checkedAt is the time this Actor checked the source, not proof that the underlying data was published that day. See Using CQC data.

Start with the ready-to-edit one-location lookup example, saved with one-location/provider bounds and a $0.03 spending limit. Review its input and pricing before running. For a lookup-to-spreadsheet walkthrough, see the public care-provider CSV guide. It explains how to retain source dates and distinguish lookup from monthly discovery.

Quick start

1. Run the prefilled Lookup example to check one public care service, then replace its ID with the services you need. Choose Discovery for a snapshot-based shortlist instead.
2. Start with a small limit. For discovery, select a report-publication lookback, ratings, region or service-type filters as needed.
3. In Discovery mode, optionally enter an England postcode and radius. Distance is straight-line distance to each service location, not driving distance or distance to the provider's office. The origin is a secret input, is sent to Postcodes.io for geocoding, and is not included in the output.
4. Review the Pricing tab and set a spending limit that covers the provider fees and platform usage.
5. Run the Actor. Use Provider overview for the grouped shortlist or Reports and locations for a flat spreadsheet. Open the CQC links before relying on a record.

Discovery example

{
  "mode": "DISCOVERY",
  "lookbackDays": 90,
  "ratings": ["Requires improvement", "Inadequate"],
  "maxLocationsToCheck": 25,
  "maxProviders": 25
}

Discovery supports a lookback of 1–365 days. It defaults to 90 days and the two ratings above. Optional regions filters accept CQC region names; serviceTypes filters match fragments such as care home or domiciliary. Discovery is scoped to adult social care, not hospitals, dentists or GP practices. Publication dates and ratings are checked again against the public location page before an entry is returned. An unknown publication date is excluded rather than guessed. A report-publication filter is not an inspection-visit-date filter. Results describe the source's available ratings; they are not a newly made judgement about a service.

For a geographic search, you can add originPostcode and maxDistanceMiles. For example, SW1A 0AA is the public postcode of the UK Parliament, not a private origin. CQC covers England; this Actor does not support Northern Ireland/BT origins or search the separate Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish care registers.

Lookup example

This runnable example checks Regency Park, a public CQC-listed care service. Copy the location ID from another CQC location URL to check your own services:

{
  "mode": "LOOKUP",
  "locationIds": ["1-13361514096"],
  "maxLocationsToCheck": 1,
  "maxProviders": 1
}

On 27 October 2026, this example returned Bright Futures Care Limited, one matched location, a Good overall rating and an available report published 7 August 2026. This is a public-source functionality example, not a customer, endorsement or outcome claim; source data can change. The linked report is the authority.

Lookup accepts 1–100 supplied IDs. It ignores Discovery's ratings, lookback, region, service-type and radius filters, so a requested location can be returned with a Good rating, an older report or an unknown publication date. It skips services whose adult-social-care classification or provider/location identity cannot be verified. It returns the latest observable metadata, not every historical report. It is preferable to discovery when you need to check a particular service that may not be present in the current discovery snapshot.

Output and downloads

The underlying dataset contains one row per provider, with the matched location/report entries nested in reports.

• Provider overview / Provider CSV: provider identity, matched-location count, latest available report-publication date, ratings, location names, regions, optional nearest-location distance, source details and coverage notes.
• Reports and locations / Report CSV: one row per matched location/report entry, with provider identity, location ID/name, current available rating, report-publication date and source links. It is not one row for every historical inspection.
• Full JSON: preserves the nested reports array and metadata. Unavailable values remain null rather than being invented.

An illustrative shortened row:

{
  "providerId": "ILLUSTRATIVE_PROVIDER_ID",
  "providerName": "Illustrative Care Provider Ltd",
  "matchedLocations": 1,
  "latestReportPublishedAt": "2026-09-15",
  "ratings": ["Requires improvement"],
  "locationNames": ["Illustrative Care Service"],
  "regions": ["London"],
  "nearestLocationDistanceMiles": null,
  "reports": [
    {
      "locationId": "ILLUSTRATIVE_LOCATION_ID",
      "locationName": "Illustrative Care Service",
      "locationUrl": null,
      "reportId": null,
      "reportUrl": null,
      "reportPublishedAt": "2026-09-15",
      "currentRating": "Requires improvement",
      "ratingSource": "Illustrative source label",
      "region": "London",
      "postcode": null,
      "distanceMiles": null
    }
  ],
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-27T12:00:00.000Z",
  "sourceType": "ILLUSTRATIVE",
  "sourcePublishedAt": "2026-10-01",
  "coverageNote": "Illustrative monthly-source example, not a complete daily report feed."
}

The names, IDs, dates and rating above are invented solely to show the format. They are not a real care service, a live result or evidence that a customer achieved an outcome.

currentRating and the linked report's publication date can refer to different source updates. Do not assume the rating was awarded in that report or infer a downgrade without checking the source. A missing report date, an empty search or an unavailable page does not prove that a service has no reports or is unregistered.

Pricing and run limits

• $0.01 per distinct provider record delivered in a run. Twenty-five providers cost $0.25 in report fees; one provider with several matched locations still costs $0.01.
• Apify platform usage is charged separately. Compute, transfer and storage depend on the run and your plan. There is no publisher run-start fee, but an empty or unsuccessful search can still incur platform usage.
• Empty searches, source errors and excluded locations do not create a provider-report fee. Dataset storage is attempted before its provider charge. The two operations are not an atomic transaction: if either cannot be confirmed, RUN_SUMMARY flags the uncertainty so you can check the dataset and platform charge history before retrying. Repeat runs are billed separately; downloading an existing result does not start a new CQC search, although storage access can incur platform usage.
• Both maxLocationsToCheck and maxProviders default to 25 and are capped at 100. Increasing maxProviders does not bypass the location-check cap. A bounded or interrupted search is not an exhaustive list of services in an area.
• There are no DataForSEO, LLM, residential-proxy or paid-routing charges in this Actor.

Use a narrow search and review the run summary if results are empty or fewer than expected. Check source freshness, filters, location limits and source errors before repeating a run. If all checked public pages fail, the run fails rather than presenting those failures as a valid empty search. Partial failures and limits can leave an incomplete result; errors are not emitted as billable provider rows.

Discovery must process a large national workbook even when you request a small shortlist. The default 2 GB run allocation provides more CPU for this step; lowering memory can substantially slow it down. Lookup avoids that workbook. The default timeout is 15 minutes. A stopped run whose summary has finalized: false is incomplete: check the run status and platform charge history instead of treating initial zero counters as a final billing statement.

Fit and boundaries

Useful for analysts and care-sector teams who need a provider-grouped, source-linked review sheet. For a single manual check, CQC's own service search may be sufficient. The official data downloads are available directly; this Actor charges for processing and organisation, not ownership of that public information.

This version does not return full report text, clinical themes, personal contacts, a lead score, expected revenue, rating-change alerts or a complete historical archive. It creates no schedule, monitoring subscription or outreach. It is not clinical, safeguarding, regulatory, legal or investment advice. Review current CQC evidence and obtain appropriate professional advice for consequential decisions.

Sources and attribution

Source: Care Quality Commission public information. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. CQC retains its source rights. This tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by CQC and does not use its logo. OGL does not license personal data or third-party rights; these are not a licence to republish identifiable report quotations or make unsolicited approaches.

Optional postcode geocoding uses Postcodes.io. Its licence page provides the following underlying-data notices:

• Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2025.
• Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
• Contains NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.

No personal origin postcode, credentials, private outcomes or private commercial assumptions are included in dataset rows. When reporting an issue, provide a run ID and a non-sensitive description; do not post tokens or private postcodes.