Your CQC rating may be older than the service it describes

No provider in England can say with any confidence when the next CQC assessment will land on a given location. You can say what rating is showing on the CQC website this morning. For a growing share of registered locations, nobody has checked recently enough to know whether that rating still describes the service being delivered on the floor today.

That has commercial consequences before it has regulatory ones. Local authority and integrated care board commissioners read the published rating. So do families choosing a home. The rating on the page carries weight whatever its age, and the provider absorbs the consequence either way.

The distance between a rating and the service it describes has widened over the past three years, and CQC has published the numbers itself.

Why CQC assessment volumes fell 63% in two years

CQC's Annual Report and Accounts 2024/25, published on 21 May 2026, sets it out in two consecutive sentences:

"During 2024/25, we published 3,825 reports of health and social care assessments".

"This compares with 6,230 assessments during 2023/24 and 10,356 during 2022/23".

That is a fall of 63% in two years, across every sector CQC regulates. The regulator attributes the drop to problems with its technology and an operational restructure, alongside changes to the assessment framework itself. None of those causes sits with providers.

What the government-commissioned analysis found about aged ratings

The Dash review's supporting data analysis, published on GOV.UK on 17 October 2024, gives the position for social care specifically.

As at 30 July 2024, 82% of social care locations registered with CQC in England carried a rating, against 97% of GP locations and 44% of NHS acute hospital locations. The other 18% had never been rated under the previous inspection framework.

Across all locations registered with CQC, the never-rated share has been rising. The same document records that "Over the past 5 years, the proportion of locations that had never been rated by CQC (under their previous inspection framework) has increased from 13% in 2019 to 19% in 2024". Over the same period the average age of an overall rating almost doubled, from 2 years old in 2020 to approximately 3 years and 11 months old in 2024.

The oldest rating held by a social care organisation at the time of that analysis dated from February 2016. A service in England was carrying a rating awarded more than eight years earlier, and that is what a commissioner or a family would have seen.

Counting 2,303 locations registered with CQC in England

We counted CQC's public directory on 27 August 2026 and recomputed the social care subset on 6 September 2026, covering twelve of England's largest care home, homecare and supported living operators. Those twelve run 2,303 live registered locations in England. Of those, 1,726 carry a current rating and 577 do not, which is 25.1% of the 2,303.

Three limitations belong with that number.

"No current rating" is not CQC's "never rated". A location that re-registers under a different legal entity loses its rating and appears in the directory as unrated. Large corporate groups restructure and re-register more often than small ones, so their unrated share is inflated for administrative reasons as well as regulatory ones.

A recently registered location is not a backlog. A service that opened this year and has not yet been assessed is exactly where CQC's schedule would put it. Our count does not filter by registration date.

The count is dated. It reads the directory as at 27 August 2026, with the social care subset recomputed on 6 September. It holds for roughly three months from the count date and will need recounting after that.

Two published readings bracket that count, and neither measures exactly what we measured. Government-commissioned analysis put social care at 18% never rated on 30 July 2024. The Homecare Association, in analysis published on 10 June 2026 using CQC directory data downloaded on 5 May 2026, found more than four in five community social care services with no current CQC rating, and 36.9% never assessed. Our 25.1% uses that same metric, no current rating, on a different population: twelve large multi-site operators, where the Homecare Association counts a community sector dominated by small domiciliary agencies. The figures are not directly comparable and we are not claiming they agree. What each of them records, on its own terms, is a substantial share of registered social care locations without a current rating.

Fifty-three legal entities behind twelve care brands

The second finding from that count has nothing to do with ratings. Those twelve brands are registered with CQC as 53 separate providers.

Avery Healthcare's 39 registered locations in England sit across 19 legal entities. Agincare's 111 sit across 8. Fifty-three registrations across twelve brands is a matter of corporate structure. None of it is improper.

CQC registration and the evidence trail attached to it are organised by legal entity, not by brand. A group that is one operating model to its staff can be a dozen separate regulatory relationships on paper. A single group-level view of workforce compliance does not exist naturally when an estate is registered that way. It has to be built deliberately, and it is usually built outside the systems that hold the underlying records.

CQC's recovery: 9,000 assessments targeted across all sectors

Volumes are rising again. In an update on 26 May 2026, CQC said: "We continue to be on track to meet our target to publish reports for at least 9,000 assessments across all sectors by September 2026". That target falls due this month, and CQC has not yet published the outturn. An earlier update, on 27 November 2025, reported 50% more inspections in November 2025 than in November 2024.

The May update also lists what CQC is prioritising in adult social care, verbatim:

"Services with urgent, emerging risks that inspection teams have identified.
Services that have not been assessed since registration where the data we hold identifies as very high risk.
Services registered for over a year that have not yet been assessed.
Services with a rating over 6 years old".

Two of those four criteria turn on time elapsed alone. A service that has run quietly and well for years qualifies on age alone.

One caution applies to the framework itself. CQC's position on that page is that providers should "continue to refer to the current published guidance on how we assess quality and performance" until the new regulatory approach is implemented. The draft sector-specific frameworks are out for feedback and are not in force. Adult social care is assessed under the single assessment framework today.

What a registered manager has to produce for a Regulation 19 check

A location with a rating over six years old sits on CQC's published priority list, and CQC has not said when it will act on it.

The test is what a registered manager can put in front of an inspector on a Tuesday morning with no notice. Regulation 19 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 requires the Schedule 3 information to be available for each person employed. Schedule 3 defines satisfactory as satisfactory in the opinion of the Commission. Bank and agency workers are inside that. CQC's Regulation 19 guidance states that "'person employed' will include any member of staff who currently works in the service as a volunteer or a contractor, as well as agency or bank staff".

The record does not have to be paper. CQC's Regulation 19 employment requirements guidance says: "It is not necessary for providers to keep documents in paper format. Electronic or online evidence can also be used". What a digital file needs to hold is covered in building CQC evidence that passes inspection.

That is where the work sits. Automated primary source verification against DBS and the professional registers takes the manual chase out of the check. Monitoring that flags a right to work document or professional registration before it expires removes the scramble after an unannounced visit. Credentially does both, and holds the result in the record CQC would ask to see.

What works is being able to produce workforce evidence for any location on any given day, without a fortnight of preparation first. Providers who can do that stop treating an assessment as an event they have to see coming.

For what inspectors ask to see under Safe and Well-led, our CQC inspection preparation checklist for workforce compliance sets it out section by section.

References

1. Care Quality Commission, Annual Report and Accounts 2024/25: performance analysis, published 21 May 2026, page last updated 1 June 2026
2. Department of Health and Social Care / Dr Penny Dash, Analysis of Care Quality Commission data on inspections, assessments and ratings, 2014 to 2024, GOV.UK, published 17 October 2024
3. Care Quality Commission, Priorities for delivering more assessments and tackling aged ratings, published 26 May 2026
4. Care Quality Commission, Update on improving how we work, published 27 November 2025
5. Care Quality Commission, Regulation 19: Fit and proper persons employed, and the accompanying employment requirements guidance
6. The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, SI 2014/2936, regulation 19 and Schedule 3
7. Homecare Association, Unseen and unrated: more than four in five community social care services in England have no current CQC rating, new analysis finds, published 10 June 2026, using CQC directory data downloaded 5 May 2026
8. Credentially analysis of CQC's public register covering twelve adult social care operators, taken 27 August 2026, social care subset recomputed 6 September 2026. Method and known limitations are set out in the three caveats above.