A CQC rating is one word about one visit on one day. It is the most useful public information you have about a home care agency, and it answers less than people assume. Here is what it covers, what it leaves out, and how to read one properly.
Registration and rating are not the same thing
Every agency providing personal care in England must register with the Care Quality Commission. Registration is permission to trade. It says the service has met the conditions for operating and can be inspected. It is not a recommendation and it is not a quality mark.
A rating is separate. It comes from an inspection, and it only exists once an inspector has been. Of the 15,668 home care services on the English register today, 7,451 carry a published rating. That leaves 8,217 with none at all, which is 52% of the sector.
So an agency with no rating is the normal case, not a red flag. Usually it has not been inspected since it registered.
The four words
Inspectors give one of four overall ratings. Across the English register today:
- Outstanding: 383 services. Rare, and worth reading the report for.
- Good: 6,278 services. The overwhelming majority of rated agencies.
- Requires improvement: 781 services. Something specific was wrong. The report says what.
- Inadequate: 9 services. Serious failings, and the service is usually already under enforcement.
Because Good covers so much of the register, the word on its own separates almost nobody from almost anybody. What separates them is underneath it.
Read the five key questions, not the headline
Every inspection rates five things: whether the service is safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. The overall rating is a judgement across all five, and the five do not have to agree.
On 1,188 rated services, at least one of the five scored lower than the headline. 807 of those still read Good on the front of the report. The question that most often falls behind is well-led, on 550 services.
That is the single most useful thing on the page. An agency rated Good overall and Requires improvement on safe is telling you exactly where to point your questions.
Check the date before you trust the word
Ratings do not expire. They sit on the record until the next inspection, however long that takes.
Half of all published ratings in this dataset are more than 5.3 years old. 54% of them, 4,033 services, were rated more than five years ago. Home care is a business where the registered manager, the office team and most of the carers can turn over completely in that time.
A Good from 2019 describes an organisation that may no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Treat the date as part of the rating.
Scotland works differently
The Care Inspectorate does not give one overall word. It grades services from 1 to 6 on several themes, where 6 is excellent and 1 is unsatisfactory, and publishes the grade for each theme separately. There are 2,398 Scottish services on this site and they are shown that way.
With grades, the lowest number tells you more than the highest. It is the theme the inspector was least satisfied with.
What a rating will never tell you
It will not tell you whether the same carer comes each time. It will not tell you what happens at 7am on a Sunday when someone calls in sick. It will not tell you what they charge, whether travel time is paid, or how they handle a complaint from a family who is already upset.
Those answers come from ringing them. Start with the report, then ask the questions the report cannot answer.
Where these figures come from
Every number on this page is counted from the CQC register and the CQC ratings API as held on this site on 18 September 2026, and recounted each time the page is built. The register is published under the Open Government Licence. Our full method is on the data page.