Clear Care Connect vs Caring.com — Which is Better for Finding Senior Care in 2026?
When your family needs senior care, every resource matters — and the difference between two websites can quietly shape which facility your parent moves into. Caring.com is a large, well-organised directory with strong editorial guides and a long review archive, and it is unusually candid in its regulatory disclosures about how it earns money. Clear Care Connect is not a referral agent at all, which changes what you see and who contacts you afterwards. Both tools help families, and this page is honest about where Caring.com is the better choice. The short version of the difference: Clear Care Connect shows the government inspection record on every facility, never sells your contact information, and never lets a facility pay its way up the results. This is one of the hardest decisions a family ever makes, and you deserve to make it with the full record in front of you.
Clear Care Connect vs Caring.com at a glance
| Feature | Clear Care Connect | Caring.com |
|---|---|---|
| Total facilities listed | 22,379 verified facilities across 52 states and territories | No current total is publicly disclosed; it operates a nationwide directory and built an assisted living directory in partnership with U.S. News & World Report in 2019 |
| Government inspection data | Yes — real CMS star ratings, inspection reports, deficiency history, penalties and fire safety data | Listing ratings are drawn from consumer reviews; no CMS star rating, deficiency or penalty integration was found on its facility pages |
| Do they sell your contact information | Never — we do not sell leads or charge facilities for referrals | Its Oregon referral-agent disclosure states that most referrals go to providers with a business-to-business contract, that fees are paid by the admitting home or facility, and that it obtains recorded verbal consent before sharing a family's information with providers |
| Paid placement affecting results | No — results are never influenced by which facility pays more | Confirmed in its own disclosure — referrals are directed to contracted providers, with fee rights lasting from six months to an indeterminate duration after a referral |
| CMS penalty and deficiency history | Yes — full penalty records and deficiency details available | No published penalty or deficiency history on listings |
| Cost to families | Completely free to search, with no sales pressure | Free to families; the admitting facility pays the referral fee |
| Coverage | 52 states and territories | Nationwide United States |
| Facility types covered | Nursing homes, assisted living, memory care, home health, adult day programs and CCRCs | Independent living, assisted living, memory care, residential and adult foster care homes, CCRCs, nursing facilities, home care and adult day care |
| Medicaid eligibility estimator | Yes — free Medicaid eligibility and spend-down estimator covering 11 service types in all 51 states and DC | No comparable eligibility estimator published |
| Free senior care cost data | Yes — free state-by-state senior care cost data, downloadable as CSV with no email required | Cost guidance is published, but detailed pricing is typically gated behind a contact form or advisor call |
| Senior care glossary | Yes — 155-term searchable senior care glossary with plain-English definitions | Yes — a caregiving glossary is published, though it is not a searchable 155-term senior care index |
| Head-to-head comparison pages | Yes — 8 published head-to-head comparisons, including this one | None — competitors are not compared side by side |
The data privacy difference
Many senior care finder websites operate on a referral model. When a family submits an inquiry, their contact information becomes a paid lead, and that lead is often passed to several communities at once. The result is familiar to anyone who has done it: a phone that rings for weeks, from numbers you do not recognise, at the single most stressful moment your family has faced in years.
To its credit, Caring.com documents this openly and says it takes recorded consent before passing your details along. But consent to be contacted is not the same as not being contacted: once a referral is made, the fee relationship can run for six months or longer.
Clear Care Connect never sells contact information and never charges facilities for referrals. There is no partner network standing behind a form. When you request a tour, that request goes directly to the one facility you chose, and nowhere else. You can search all 22,379 facilities without creating an account, and nothing you look at generates a sales call.
The government data advantage
Clear Care Connect pulls data directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that inspects and certifies senior care facilities. That means real inspection history, the actual deficiency citations a surveyor wrote down, penalty records including civil money penalties and payment denials, fire safety inspection results, staffing measures and the official five-star ratings.
Caring.com's editorial content often explains CMS ratings well. What it does not do is attach the underlying inspection record to each facility page, which is where the difference shows up when you are comparing two nursing homes on the same street.
This matters because government inspection data reveals what marketing materials are designed to hide. A brochure will show you a sunlit dining room. An inspection report will show you whether residents went without prescribed medication, whether call lights went unanswered, whether the building failed a life safety code check. Both are true; only one of them is written by someone with no financial interest in your decision.
Facility coverage
Clear Care Connect lists 22,379 verified facilities across 52 states and territories. Every facility is matched against CMS government records before it is published, so a listing is evidence that the facility exists in the federal record — not that someone paid to appear.
Caring.com covers a similarly broad set of care types nationwide. The distinction is provenance: every Clear Care Connect listing traces back to a government record rather than to a directory submission or a contracted provider relationship.
Coverage spans the care types families actually move between: skilled nursing homes, assisted living, memory care, hospice, home health, adult day programs and continuing care retirement communities. You can start in a state hub such as nursing homes in California or Texas, narrow to a city, and compare facilities side by side without ever entering a phone number.
Where Caring.com wins
Caring.com has one of the strongest editorial libraries in the category — cost guides, Medicaid explainers and care-type comparisons that are clearly written and regularly updated — plus a deep archive of consumer reviews going back years.
It is also refreshingly transparent about its referral economics, publishing state-mandated disclosures that many competitors do not. If you want a human referral service and want to understand exactly how it is paid, Caring.com documents that better than most.
Frequently asked questions
Is Clear Care Connect better than Caring.com for finding nursing homes?
For nursing home research, Clear Care Connect gives you the government record — star ratings, inspection findings, deficiencies, penalties and fire safety — attached to each facility, with no referral contract behind the listing. Caring.com is stronger for editorial guides and consumer reviews, and it offers a human referral service if you want one.
Does Clear Care Connect sell my information like other senior care finder sites?
No. Clear Care Connect does not sell leads, does not charge facilities for referrals and does not pass your details to a partner network. Tour requests go only to the facility you pick.
How many facilities does Clear Care Connect list compared to Caring.com?
Clear Care Connect lists 22,379 verified facilities across 52 states and territories. Caring.com does not publicly disclose a current total, so a precise side-by-side count is not possible.
Does Caring.com show government inspection data?
Its facility pages present consumer review ratings rather than CMS inspection data. Its guides explain CMS star ratings, but the deficiency and penalty records themselves are not published per facility.
Find senior care with complete government data and zero sales pressure
Search 22,379 verified facilities across 52 states and territories. See real CMS inspection reports, official star ratings, penalty history and fire safety records alongside estimated monthly costs. No account is required to search, and no contact information is ever sold. When you are ready to tour, your request goes to that facility alone.
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Sources
- caring.com Oregon long-term care referral agent disclosure
- PRNewswire, U.S. News & World Report partnership, September 2019