US News & World Report is recognizing 1,675 senior living communities with top ratings in the second year of its Best Senior Living program. That compares with 1,274 communities rated as “Best” in the program’s inaugural year.

The latest results were announced today.

The program includes independent living, assisted living, memory care and continuing care retirement/life plan communities. Online profile pages for each recognized community share where they are rated as “Best” overall, community details, specific areas where they were judged to excel by residents and their families, and accolades and testimonials to help older adults and their families evaluate places to live.

The newest ratings incorporate data from more than 250,000 surveys of residents and family members collected between April and November 2022. To be recognized as one of the Best Senior Living communities for 2023-2024, individual locations had to earn a specific final weighted score tabulated in the methodology developed by the US News health data analytics team.

This year, surveys were conducted for 3,867 communities, 3,509 met the eligibility criteria and 1,675 were recognized as “Best” in one or more of the categories of independent living, assisted living and memory care. Of those communities, 62 were recognized as Best CCRCs.

Methodology changes based on feedback

Some of the methodology for this year’s program was changed from last year based on feedback from operators and consumers, Zach Adams, the principal analyst on the project, told McKnight’s Senior Living.

“We updated our criteria for Best CCRC based on feedback from the industry,” he said. “We heard feedback from a couple of organizations across a couple of states that what is and is not a CCRC, depending on the state, may vary, and we also wanted to integrate information from the Best Nursing Homes project, which I’m also the principal analyst on.”

Some of the weighting of factors in the scoring also was changed based on comments from residents or their families, Adams said.

For example, he said, from further research, US News learned that people value food and dining programs less than had been thought.

“We found that when making this [community selection] decision for themselves or for their family members, food was pretty low on the list of things that people said they cared about,” Adams said. “It plays into their decision-making, but compared with other elements of that decision, food ranked a lot lower on that list. So we slightly down-weighted food’s importance in the weighting.”

On the other hand, he said, people rated safety and security as being of very high importance.

“That was extremely important to people, across the board, whether it be independent living or assisted living or memory care,” Adams said. “Safety was right there at the top,” so the weighting was changed to reflect that discovery.

Additionally, he said, scoring thresholds were adjusted to unify them across independent living, assisted living and memory care to help consumers understand them better and to account for the fact that this year’s scores “trended slightly upward” overall compared with last year’s scores.

“I don’t know whether that’s because people are happier with the state of the world compared with the prior year,” he said, noting that this year’s surveys were conducted in 2022 and the previous survey period was in 2021. “I think that people had a lot more uncertainty about their lives in 2021 than in 2022,” he said.

138 companies recognized

The US News Best Senior Living finder displays the “Best” ratings for rated communities as well as additional information for prospective residents and their families and others searching for more information about senior living communities. Listings exist for communities not rated as “Best” also, and “some of them may earn accolades for specific domains” such as food, and may display trophy icons for those domains in their listings, Adams said.

In all this year, 138 companies had communities evaluated and recognized as “Best.” Large operators Brookdale Senior Living and Sunrise Senior Living had 265 and 130 communities recognized, respectively, but 27 of the 138 companies had one community each recognized.

Forty-nine states — all but Alaska — and Washington, DC, were represented in this year’s “Best” ratings. Texas, with 144 communities, Florida (126) and California (125) were the only states with more than 100 communities recognized. Hawaii, Montana, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and DC had the fewest number of communities recognized (other than Alaska), at one each.

For the 2023-2024 ratings overall, 43% of all communities surveyed earned at least one “Best” recognition (independent living, assisted living, memory care, CCRC). Additionally, 17 senior living companies with more than 20 participating communities each received awards for more than half of their participating communities:

  • Kisco Senior Living: 86% of participating communities were recognized
  • HumanGood: 85%
  • Brightview Senior Living: 84%
  • Aegis Living: 83%
  • Principal Senior Living Group: 80%
  • Brandywine Living: 77%
  • Leisure Care: 75%
  • Agemark Senior Living: 71%
  • The Arbor Company: 70%
  • Americare Senior Living: 68%
  • Morning Pointe Senior Living: 65%
  • Benchmark Senior Living: 63%
  • Ebenezer Senior Living: 62%
  • Belmont Village Senior Living: 53%
  • Grace Management: 53%
  • Sunrise Senior Living: 52%
  • Sagora Senior Living: 51%

US News will present a free webinar on the ratings and the methodology behind them on May 18 for industry leaders, consumers and others.