How to check whether a home is actually licensed for memory care

If you are looking at a nursing home you can read the same measures for it in every state, because Medicare certifies nursing homes federally and publishes them on Care Compare. Assisted living has no federal equivalent, and memory care is an addition to assisted living, so it inherits all of that variation and adds more of its own.

In practice the designation turns up in at least four different shapes. It can be a licence type of its own. It can be a certificate held on top of an ordinary assisted living licence, which means no licence-type column anywhere will ever reveal it. It can be a count of dementia beds recorded beside the licensed bed count. Or it can be a separate file of special care units, keyed to the parent home’s licence number and never mentioned by the roster a family would find first.

That is why this page exists rather than a sentence telling you to check your state’s website. Which of those four shapes applies where your parent lives is not something you can reason out, and it is not consistent even between neighbouring states.

An empty memory care column is the most dangerous thing on any care directory, including this one. It looks like an answer and it usually is not. For 41% of the homes here we hold neither a yes nor a no, so a blank is telling you about our records rather than about the building.

In 7 jurisdictions it is stronger than that, because of how the records we read are built. For California, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Maine, New Jersey and West Virginia, the files we collect carry the designation where it applies and carry no entry at all where it does not. Not one explicit denial exists in what we hold for any of them. So in those places a blank is silence by construction, and reading it as a no would be inventing an answer we were never given.

We know that is the right reading because it was measured rather than assumed. In California, the code that marks a home as serving dementia was checked against the state’s own per-facility records and held every time. The code that marks a home as serving the elderly generally, which looks like the opposite answer, turned out to include homes that do serve dementia. The two sources disagree outright. So this directory records a yes where the state says yes and records nothing otherwise, and never converts an absence into a no.

20,047 homes are confirmed for memory care in what we hold, and 41% of them are in a single jurisdiction, Washington. A national total assembled from fifty different designations is not a like-for-like count, and this is the clearest example of why.

Nine in ten listings in Washington are adult family homes, which are ordinary houses licensed for up to six residents, and no other state licenses that shape at this scale. The dementia designation is published for those homes and almost all of them carry it, so there it means licensed to serve dementia rather than a dedicated memory care wing. Washington’s larger assisted living facilities carry no designation at all, which is why they show a blank rather than a no.

So the honest way to read the table below is one row at a time, against the state your parent actually lives in. The totals are useful for understanding how uneven the picture is. They are not a census of memory care beds in America, and nobody should quote them as one.

The quickest way to get this wrong is to treat the home’s name as the answer. A building called something Assisted Living and Memory Care is describing itself, and a home whose name says nothing of the kind may hold the designation perfectly well. The name is chosen by the operator. The designation is a determination by a regulator, and only one of those is a fact about the care.

This is easy to demonstrate in the data. Several of the most memory-care-sounding names in this directory are chain product names, repeated verbatim over homes in states with entirely different licensing systems behind them. The words travel with the brand rather than with the licence, which is exactly what makes them useless as evidence.

We considered reading the flag off facility names when we could not find it published and decided against it, for the same reason. It would have produced a fuller-looking directory and a worse one, because the thing it filled in would have been marketing.

Georgia is the case that does not fit either column, and it is worth understanding because it is probably not the only one. The state’s own administrative rule, Rule 111-8-63-.19, Additional Requirements for Certified Memory Care Centers, sets dementia-specific staffing ratios, secured outdoor space, exit alerting and training hours. The category plainly exists.

A certified memory care center there is a unit inside an assisted living community or personal care home, so it is a certification held on top of a licence and never a licence type. No facility-type column could carry it. We looked for a public list of which homes hold the certificate in the state’s inspection archive and in its facility search, and did not find one as of September 2026.

That distinction matters more than it looks. Telling a family in Georgia that their state has no memory care category would be false, and the state’s own rulebook would say so. What is true is narrower: we have not found the list of holders. For the 2,511 assisted living homes we hold there, the useful move is not to look for a register. It is to ask each home whether it is certified, and to ask to see the certificate.

Four jurisdictions were resolved in a single week in August 2026, and no two of them the same way. They are worth listing because they show why searching a state’s main facility roster is usually not enough.

• In a file already being downloaded, and discarded. California records dementia care as a client-served code in a mapping layer we had been fetching monthly for coordinates. We checked every column of the bulk export that a search of the state’s site leads to first, and the code is in none of them.
• One page below the roster. In West Virginia the searchable roster carries nothing, and each facility’s own detail page carries a structured Alzheimer’s bed count beside its licensed and certified beds.
• In a sibling dataset the roster never mentions. New York publishes an Adult Care Facility quarterly statistical report alongside its directory, and the certified special-needs bed count sits in the report rather than the directory. They join exactly on the certificate number.
• As its own file of units. North Carolina publishes licensed special care units separately, keyed on the parent home’s licence number.

The practical lesson for a family is short. If your state’s facility search shows nothing about memory care, that is not the end of the search. Look for a per-facility detail page, and ask the licensing agency whether the designation is published anywhere else. They will often say yes.

Grouped by how a jurisdiction answers, most useful first, and within each group by how many homes are confirmed. A jurisdiction moves between these groups on its own as we collect more, and the groups are computed rather than kept in a list.

Where we hold nothing, the home itself is the better source and the request is simple. Ask whether it is licensed or certified by the state to provide dementia or memory care, and ask to see the document. Where a certificate exists this is something a family can actually do, and a home that holds one will not mind being asked.

Then ask the three questions the certificate is standing in for, because they are what you actually want to know. How many staff are trained specifically in dementia care, and for how many hours. Whether the unit is secured, and what that means in practice. And what happens if your parent’s needs progress beyond what the home is licensed to provide, because the answer to that one determines whether you are choosing a home once or twice.

A home that answers those plainly is giving you better information than any register can, and one that will not is also telling you something.

Is there a national memory care licence?

No. Memory care is a category that individual states layer on top of assisted living, and they do it in different ways and under different names. Some states issue a distinct licence type. Some certify a unit inside a home that already holds an assisted living licence. Some record a count of dementia beds without calling it memory care at all. And some appear to keep the determination without publishing a list of which homes hold it. There is no federal register and no shared definition, which is why the same question about the same kind of home gets a different answer depending on the state.

A listing shows nothing under memory care. Does that mean the home does not offer it?

No, and this is the single most important thing on this page. For a large share of the facilities in this directory neither answer appears in anything we have been able to collect, so a blank is telling you about our records rather than about the home. It is worse than that in a handful of jurisdictions, where the files we read carry the designation on the homes that hold it and carry no entry at all for the rest. In those places a blank is silence by construction and can never be read as a no. Call the home and ask.

The home is called something Memory Care. Is that the same as being licensed for it?

It is not, and the two come apart in both directions. A name is chosen by the operator and is often a chain brand rather than a description of a particular building, so the same words appear over homes in different states with different licences behind them. A home with no such words in its name may be certified perfectly well. The regulator’s determination and the sign over the door are separate things, and only one of them is a fact about the care.

What should I ask a facility about its memory care licensing?

Ask directly whether the home is licensed or certified by the state to provide dementia or memory care, and ask to see the document. Where a certificate exists this is something a family can actually do, and a home that holds one will not mind being asked. Then ask the questions the certificate is a proxy for: how many staff are trained specifically in dementia care and for how many hours, whether the unit is secured and how, and what happens if your parent’s needs change beyond what the home is licensed to provide.

Why does this vary so much between states?

Assisted living grew up outside the federal system because it is mostly paid for privately, so it is licensed by states as a housing and social care category rather than a medical one. Dementia care arrived later still, as an addition to rules that were already fifty different sets. The result is that one state treats memory care as its own licence, its neighbour treats it as a certificate on top of one, and a third records it as a bed count on a page you have to open one facility at a time. None of them were coordinating.