Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
Care Circle Network analysis of England’s adult social care market has identified a striking gap between the rating people see and the age of the evidence sitting behind it. More than half of active services with a usable overall rating are carrying a rating published at least four years ago — while 7,693 locations currently rated Good have a published rating more than six years old.
A care service can change enormously in six years.
Registered managers change. Workforces change. Ownership can change. Digital care systems are introduced. Buildings are refurbished. New clinical responsibilities emerge. Safeguarding practice develops. Commissioners change their expectations. Providers absorb new regulation, new technology and new financial pressures.
The people receiving care may also be entirely different.
Yet for thousands of adult social care services, one of the most visible public signals of quality may still originate from a very different point in the organisation’s history.
That does not mean the rating is wrong.
It does raise a much more important question:
How should we interpret a Good rating when the evidence that produced it is several years old?
New analysis from the Care Circle Network Provider Intelligence Observatory suggests this question is now too significant to ignore.
The scale of the rating-age gap
Care Circle Network analysed 29,545 active adult social care locations across England within the Provider Intelligence Observatory.
Of these, 22,786 locations currently have a usable published overall rating of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate.
The age profile is striking.
12,047 — 52.9% — have a published overall rating at least four years old.
9,669 — 42.4% — have a rating at least five years old.
And 8,560 — 37.6% — have a rating at least six years old.
The deeper finding, however, is not simply that many ratings are old.
It is which ratings are oldest.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
Among active locations currently rated Good, the Observatory identifies:
- 10,560 — 57.8% — with a rating at least four years old
- 8,639 — 47.3% — with a rating at least five years old
- 7,693 — 42.1% — with a rating at least six years old
The median age of a Good rating across the active locations analysed is approximately 4.7 years.
For Outstanding services, the picture is even more pronounced.
The median published rating age is approximately 6.6 years, with 65.2% of Outstanding ratings six years old or more.
Compare that with the other end of the scale.
For services currently rated Requires Improvement, the median rating age is approximately three years, with just 5.1% more than six years old.
For active locations currently rated Inadequate, the median age is approximately six months, and none within this analysis carries an overall Inadequate rating more than six years old.
That difference matters.
This does not mean older Good services are no longer Good
It is important to be precise about what the data tells us — and what it does not.
A six-year-old Good rating is not evidence that the service has deteriorated.
Nor does the age of a rating invalidate the regulatory judgement that was made when the service was assessed.
Many services carrying older Good or Outstanding ratings may have maintained those standards, improved further and developed significantly since their previous assessment.
The issue is different.
The rating tells us what was established at the point of assessment. Rating age tells us how recently that position has been independently refreshed.
Those are not the same thing.
And increasingly, both pieces of information matter.
CQC itself now recognises the challenge created by aged ratings. In May, the regulator set out its intention to increase assessment activity while specifically addressing both aged ratings and services that have never been assessed. It remains committed to publishing reports for at least 9,000 assessments across sectors by September 2026.
The issue has become even more immediate.
On 30 July 2026, CQC published new guidance specifically addressing adult social care services with older Good ratings, stating that it is returning to services rated Good to confirm whether those ratings remain accurate. Not every service with an aged Good rating will be included through this particular approach; CQC has set eligibility criteria, including being Good overall and across all five key questions and having no ongoing enforcement activity.
That is an important development.
Because the Care Circle Network intelligence suggests the group potentially affected by the wider issue is substantial.
Why has the gap developed?
There is an understandable regulatory logic behind at least part of the pattern.
CQC’s assessment frequency is influenced by the information and evidence it receives. Assessments can be planned or responsive, including where concerning information indicates that further regulatory attention may be necessary.
A risk-led regulator will naturally concentrate a significant proportion of its capacity where risk is greater.
That helps explain why the Observatory sees much fresher ratings among services currently rated Inadequate or Requires Improvement.
A service where serious concerns have been identified is much more likely to return to regulatory attention quickly than a service previously judged to be performing well.
But over time that creates an information asymmetry.
The services that appear strongest can end up carrying some of the oldest public quality judgements.
There has also been a wider assessment-capacity problem.
CQC reported that across health and social care it published 3,825 assessment reports during 2024/25, compared with 6,230 in 2023/24 and 10,356 in 2022/23. The regulator linked that reduction to problems with technology, changes to its assessment framework and operational restructuring.
CQC is now rebuilding assessment capacity.
But the legacy of those years remains visible in the public rating landscape.
And that legacy is considerable.
For care homes, this is not a small part of the market
The Care Circle Network Provider Intelligence Observatory contains 14,746 active care homes representing 484,457 registered beds.
When we combine care homes with no usable overall rating in the Observatory with those whose usable rating is already at least four years old, the resulting group accounts for approximately:
7,966 care-home locations
and
238,268 registered care-home beds.
That is 49.2% of the registered care-home bed base within the active Observatory population.
It would be wrong to describe those 238,268 beds as being within poor-quality services.
They are not.
Many are associated with Good and Outstanding providers.
The significant point is different:
for almost half of this care-home bed base, the most recognisable public regulatory signal is either unavailable as a usable overall rating or is based on a judgement published at least four years ago.
That changes how the rating should be interpreted.
A Good rating is a quality judgement. It is not a freshness label.
CQC ratings matter enormously.
Providers that have received an overall quality rating are legally required to display it under Regulation 20A, reinforcing the rating’s importance as a visible public indicator of performance.
Families look at it.
Commissioners look at it.
Prospective employees look at it.
Lenders, insurers, investors, suppliers and potential acquirers can look at it.
Providers themselves rightly take enormous pride in achieving Good or Outstanding.
But as the rating becomes older, the information question changes.
Imagine two services both displaying Good.
One received its latest published rating in 2026.
The other received its rating in 2019.
The word displayed to the public is identical.
The recency of the independent evidence behind it is not.
That does not make the second service worse.
It simply means Good alone tells us less about what has happened since.
This is why the sector may need to become much more comfortable talking about rating plus recency, rather than rating alone.
What has happened since your last rating?
For providers with an older Good or Outstanding rating, there is another way to look at this.
An aged rating is not simply a regulatory vulnerability.
It can also be an opportunity to demonstrate how much stronger the organisation has become since it was last formally assessed.
Think about what may have changed since 2019 or 2020.
An organisation may have introduced electronic care planning.
Medication systems may have changed.
Cyber-security expectations have transformed.
International recruitment may have altered workforce composition.
New managers may have joined.
Staffing structures may have changed.
Clinical responsibilities may have increased.
Falls-prevention systems may have developed.
Governance may now use significantly better operational data.
Residents, families and commissioners may communicate with the service differently.
The provider may have completely redesigned training, auditing, safeguarding, complaints handling or quality assurance.
In some cases, the organisation CQC sees next may barely resemble the organisation behind the rating currently hanging on the wall.
That is why providers with aged ratings should resist one particular assumption:
“We are already Good, so there is nothing to prove.”
There is always something to prove.
Not because the historical rating should be distrusted, but because quality in social care is something that has to be maintained and evidenced continuously.
The new question for boards and registered managers
The most useful question may therefore no longer be:
“Are we still rated Good?”
It may be:
“Could we demonstrate today why we are Good?”
That is a very different governance conversation.
It moves attention away from the certificate and towards the evidence underneath it.
Could the organisation demonstrate what has happened to safeguarding concerns over the last year?
Could it evidence learning from incidents?
Does the board understand workforce stability rather than simply vacancy numbers?
Can managers demonstrate that staff competence keeps pace with people’s changing needs?
Are medicines audits identifying themes and producing action?
Is feedback from residents and relatives changing practice?
Can leaders show where outcomes have improved?
Do governance systems identify deterioration early?
Can the provider explain not only what policies exist but how leaders know those policies are working?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can the service demonstrate what is better today than it was when its current rating was awarded?
That is where an aged rating becomes useful.
It creates a starting point against which progress can be demonstrated.
Providers should build their own current quality picture
There is an important principle emerging from the data.
Providers should not rely on CQC to be the only organisation periodically validating whether their service remains Good.
The strongest governance model is one in which a provider maintains its own living picture of quality.
That does not mean attempting to recreate a CQC inspection internally every month.
It means leadership being able to connect evidence across the organisation.
Workforce. Safety. Complaints. Safeguarding. Medicines. Training. Resident outcomes. Family experience. Audits. Incidents. Digital systems. Governance actions. Maintenance. Business continuity. Improvement.
Individually, these can become compliance records.
Connected properly, they become evidence of organisational quality.
For providers carrying a five-, six- or seven-year-old Good rating, that current evidence layer becomes especially valuable.
Because when CQC returns, the provider’s story should not begin with what happened at the previous inspection.
It should begin with what has happened since.
There is also a challenge here for commissioners and the wider market
The rating-age gap should not only concern providers.
There is a broader question about how adult social care quality is interpreted across the system.
A commissioner comparing two services should arguably understand whether the ratings being compared were produced six months apart or six years apart.
A family researching care should be able to distinguish between an historic regulatory judgement and recent assurance.
Organisations conducting due diligence should avoid treating the four-word rating scale as the complete quality picture.
And the sector itself should be cautious about national statements built solely around the percentage of services rated Good or Outstanding without considering when those judgements were last refreshed.
Rating distribution tells us something important.
Rating age tells us something different.
The strongest view of the sector requires both.
CQC’s return to Good services matters
CQC’s decision to begin returning to eligible adult social care services with aged Good ratings is therefore significant.
It starts addressing an uncomfortable but unavoidable consequence of risk-led regulation:
success can sometimes result in less frequent independent confirmation.
The challenge now will be scale.
Our intelligence identifies 7,693 active locations currently rated Good whose published overall rating is already more than six years old.
That is not a marginal group.
It is a substantial part of England’s adult social care landscape.
Refreshing that picture will take time.
Which means providers, commissioners and those using care cannot simply wait for every historic rating to be replaced before thinking differently about quality information.
We need to get better at reading what the existing information actually tells us.
The Care Circle view
Care Circle Network is not arguing that CQC ratings should automatically expire.
Nor does our analysis suggest that thousands of Good providers have somehow ceased to provide Good care.
It shows something subtler — and perhaps more important.
A rating and the age of that rating are two separate pieces of intelligence.
The first tells us the regulator’s most recently published judgement.
The second tells us how recently that judgement was established.
As the gap grows, current operational evidence becomes increasingly important.
For strong providers, this should not be something to fear.
Quite the opposite.
A service that was rated Good six years ago and can demonstrate six years of improvement, learning, investment and stronger outcomes has a powerful story to tell.
But the rating alone cannot tell that story.
The evidence must.
And with CQC now actively returning to aged Good services, the providers in the strongest position will be those that have not spent the intervening years simply holding a Good rating.
They will be the organisations able to show, clearly and confidently, why they remain Good today.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
The finding: 7,693 active adult social care locations currently rated Good in the Care Circle Network Provider Intelligence Observatory have a published overall rating more than six years old.
The wider picture: 52.9% of all active locations with a usable overall rating have a rating at least four years old.
The care-home impact: 238,268 registered care-home beds sit within locations that either have no usable overall rating in the Observatory or have a usable rating at least four years old.
The question for the sector: should we stop reading CQC rating in isolation — and start routinely reading rating + rating age + current evidence together?
About this analysis
This Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight is based on analysis of the Care Circle Network Provider Intelligence Observatory, covering 29,545 active adult social care locations in England at the point of analysis on 9 August 2026.
For the purposes of rating-age calculations, a usable overall rating means a published overall rating of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate. Locations recorded without an overall rating, Not Rated or Insufficient Evidence to Rate are excluded from the rating-age percentages unless expressly stated otherwise.
Rating age is calculated from the recorded publication date of the latest overall rating to 9 August 2026.
The analysis describes the age and distribution of published regulatory information. It does not attempt to infer the present quality of individual services from rating age, and an older rating should not be interpreted as evidence that quality has declined.
The Care Circle Network Provider Intelligence Observatory brings together regulatory, organisational, property, workforce, digital and other public-source intelligence to examine structural changes and emerging challenges across adult social care.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
Turning sector information into clearer questions, stronger evidence and better-informed conversations.
