Every profile on this site shows when the service registered with its regulator. It is one of the few dates a family gets, so it tends to get read as how long the agency has been going. It is not that, and the gap between the two is wide enough to matter.
The English register has no memory before 2010
The Care Quality Commission took over regulation in England in 2010 and re-registered everybody. So the earliest registration date on any English home care service is 2010, whatever year the business actually opened.
An agency that has been running since 1994 and one that opened in 2010 can carry the same date. The register is not hiding anything. It simply does not go back further.
Scotland’s runs deeper. The Care Inspectorate and its predecessor have records from 2002, which is why a Scottish service can show more than twenty years and an English one cannot.
A date resets when the business changes hands
This is the part almost nobody knows. When a care agency is sold in England, the CQC does not move the registration across to the new owner. It cancels the old registration and issues a fresh one.
The carers, the office and the clients can all stay exactly as they were, and the registration date starts again from zero. On paper a thirty-year-old business becomes a new service.
We watch the register change week by week and pair those cancellations back up with the registrations that replace them. In 35 days of watching we have seen 7 of them against 93 genuinely new registrations. That is far too small a sample to turn into a rate, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is enough to say the effect is real and not rare.
See what changed on the register this week →
So what does a recent date actually mean
46.9% of the home care services on the English register today first registered between 2021 and 2025. That is 7,355 of 15,668 services.
In Scotland, over the same five years, it is 25.5%.
Both registers existed throughout 2021 to 2025, which is why those two figures can sit beside each other. The medians cannot: comparing them would report a difference in filing systems as a difference in markets. Counted from the registers as held on this site on 29 September 2026.
The English figure is high, and some of it is genuine growth. How much, we cannot tell you, because a sale and a start-up look identical in the data. Anyone quoting that 46.9% as the share of English home care agencies that are new businesses is reading it wrong, and so would we be.
What to do with the date on a profile
Treat a recent date as a question rather than an answer. Ask the agency directly: how long have you been running, and has the business changed hands? A long-established agency under new ownership will tell you so, and it is usually a better sign than a short answer.
Treat an old date as weaker evidence than it looks. It tells you the registration has not been interrupted. It tells you nothing about who owns the business now, who manages it, or whether any of the carers from that era are still there.
And read it next to the inspection date, which is the one people skip. 54% of published CQC ratings are more than five years old, so a service can carry a long registration, a reassuring word, and a verdict formed about an organisation that has turned over completely since.
What a CQC rating does and does not tell you →
Where these figures come from
Counted from the CQC register and the Care Inspectorate datastore as held on this site on 29 September 2026, and recounted every time this page is built. Both are published under the Open Government Licence. The week-by-week change figures come from our own archive of the register, which is described on the data page.