US Nursing Home Deficiencies, Penalties & Violations

Every nursing home health citation CMS has issued in the last three years — 419,000+ records — with the severity code translated into plain English and the facility's fines attached.

CMS grades every citation with a single letter from A to L. Almost nobody outside the industry knows that J, K and L mean "immediate jeopardy" — residents were in immediate danger — or that G and above means harm actually happened. This Actor decodes that grid for you and lets you filter by it directly.

Who this is for

• Elder-abuse and nursing-home negligence attorneys — filter to immediate-jeopardy and actual-harm citations in your state, see which were complaint-driven, and read the exact citation language alongside the facility's fine history. This is public inspection evidence, organized the way a case is built.
• Families choosing a facility — pull every citation for facilities in your county before you tour them. "Five stars" hides a lot; the citation text doesn't.
• Healthcare investors, operators and acquirers — diligence on a target's compliance record, or benchmark your facilities against competitors in the same market.
• Insurers and risk teams — underwriting signal that updates as new inspections post.
• Journalists and researchers — the abuse-and-neglect citation set, filterable by state and severity, in one download.

What you get

One record per citation:

{
    "provider_name": "Lakeshore Manor Nursing & Rehab",
    "cms_certification_number": "195123",
    "city": "Slidell",
    "state": "LA",
    "survey_date": "2026-03-14",
    "deficiency_tag": "F0600",
    "deficiency_category": "Freedom from Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation Deficiencies",
    "deficiency_description": "Protect each resident from all types of abuse...",
    "scope_severity_code": "L",
    "severity_label": "Immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety (widespread)",
    "harm_level": "Immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety",
    "is_immediate_jeopardy": true,
    "complaint_driven": true,
    "deficiency_corrected": "Y",
    "under_dispute": false,
    "facility_total_fines_usd": 249106,
    "facility_fine_count": 3
}

Export to Excel, CSV, or JSON in one click, or pull on a schedule via API.

How to use it

1. States — enter two-letter codes (LA, TX, CA...) or leave empty for the whole country.
2. Minimum harm level — all citations, potential-for-harm and worse (D–L), actual harm and worse (G–L), or immediate jeopardy only (J/K/L).
3. Only citations on or after a date — narrow to recent inspections.
4. Complaint-driven only — return just the citations that came from somebody filing a complaint.
5. Category contains — filter to "Abuse", "Pharmacy", "Nutrition", "Infection", and so on.
6. Include fines & penalties — attaches each facility's total CMS fines, fine count, and payment-denial days.

The severity grid, decoded

Code	What it means
A–C	No actual harm, potential for minimal harm
D–F	No actual harm, potential for more than minimal harm
G–I	Actual harm occurred
J–L	Immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety

Within each band, the second letter tells you how widespread it was: isolated, pattern, or widespread. So an L is the most serious citation CMS issues.

Data source & fair use

All data comes from the CMS Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov) — the official Health Deficiencies and Penalties datasets that CMS publishes for public use. No scraping, no bot games. The Actor reads the published JSON API politely, with paging and rate-limit handling, and republishes only what CMS itself makes public. Citation records reflect inspections at a point in time and may be under dispute (the under_dispute field flags those); always verify current status with CMS Care Compare before relying on a citation.

Want more?

Home-health agencies, hospices, and hospitals publish comparable inspection data, and sibling Actors are being built in the order people ask. Open an issue and name what you need.

Support

Questions and issues answered fast — usually within hours.