Large senior living companies
Many retirement communities belong to a company that owns or manages several. This page shows what we could verify about some of the larger ones, and the federal nursing home ratings for their owner groups.
Read this first. This is information, not a ranking or a recommendation, and a company's size says nothing about how good any one community is. The only official ratings available cover nursing homes. There is no federal rating for assisted living, independent living, 55+ or continuing care communities, so a company's assisted living quality is not captured below. For a specific community, use the steps to check it: state inspection reports, the long-term care ombudsman and the questions to ask.
Companies at a glance
Facts are from each company's own website or its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as noted. Counts change; the date or filing year is shown. Companies are listed alphabetically.
| Company | Type | What we found | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acts Retirement-Life Communities | Not-for-profit | 28 communities in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast; its site lists AL, DE, FL, GA, MD, NJ, NC, PA and SC | Company site, 2026 |
| Atria Senior Living | Private | Communities in 17 states per its site; no community count found. Holiday Retirement now appears on a site branded Holiday by Atria | Company site, 2026 |
| Brookdale Senior Living | For-profit, publicly traded | 584 communities in 41 states at the end of 2025; the company owned 370, leased 178 and managed 36 | Annual report (10-K), filed Feb. 2026 |
| Del Webb (a PulteGroup brand) | For-profit, publicly traded builder of 55+ communities | PulteGroup reports 1,014 active communities across all its brands in 26 states at the end of 2025; it does not break out Del Webb. It says many Del Webb communities are age-restricted to buyers 55 and over | Annual report (10-K), filed Feb. 2026 |
| Erickson Senior Living | Develops and manages continuing care communities | Says it serves more than 33,000 residents; a July 2026 press release reports 26,425 residences and a ranking of fourth on an industry association's list of large providers | Company site, 2026 |
| Life Care Services | Private | Says it supports more than 40,000 residents across 130+ communities that it owns or manages | Company site, 2026 |
| Lifespace Communities | Not-for-profit | 15 communities in 7 states (FL, IL, KS, MN, PA, TX, WI) | Company site, 2026 |
| Sonida Senior Living | For-profit, publicly traded | 96 communities in 20 states at the end of 2025 (84 owned, 12 managed for others) | Annual report (10-K), filed Mar. 2026 |
| Sunrise Senior Living | Private | Operates in the United States and Canada; founded 1981. The company's own pages give different community counts, so see its site for the current number | Company site, 2026 |
Many continuing care communities are run by smaller nonprofit groups such as HumanGood (Idaho, Washington and other states), Kendal, Presbyterian Homes & Services, Springpoint and Vi. See the examples by state for communities from several of them.
Federal nursing home ratings by owner group
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes average ratings for the nursing homes that share an owner or manager. Below are the owner groups matching the companies and nonprofit groups above, from the CMS dataset, data month 2026-09 (published October 14, 2026). Stars run from 1 to 5. They are CMS's own measures, averaged across each group's nursing homes.
What this does and does not show. These figures cover only the nursing homes an owner group runs. Brookdale, for instance, runs hundreds of communities, but only a small number are nursing homes that CMS counts (compare the table above with the table below). A group's score says little about its assisted living or independent living. The groups are listed alphabetically, not ranked.
| Owner group (CMS name) | Nursing homes | States | Overall | Health inspection | Staffing | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acts Retirement-Life Communities | 27 | 9 | 4.9 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 4.4 |
| Brookdale Senior Living | 12 | 8 | 3.4 | 2.8 | 4.1 | 4.3 |
| Erickson Senior Living | 17 | 10 | 4.2 | 3.6 | 4.8 | 4.1 |
| HumanGood | 17 | 7 | 4.5 | 3.6 | 4.9 | 4.2 |
| Kendal | 5 | 3 | 4.6 | 3.8 | 4.6 | 3.6 |
| Life Care Services | 43 | 18 | 4.0 | 3.6 | 4.4 | 4.0 |
| Lifespace Communities | 15 | 7 | 4.4 | 3.7 | 4.3 | 4.5 |
| Presbyterian Homes & Services | 21 | 3 | 4.3 | 3.5 | 4.9 | 2.8 |
| Springpoint Senior Living | 8 | 2 | 3.8 | 3.0 | 4.6 | 4.3 |
| Sunrise Senior Living | 4 | 3 | 3.5 | 2.8 | 3.8 | 4.8 |
| Vi Living | 10 | 6 | 4.5 | 4.1 | 5.0 | 4.6 |
| All U.S. nursing homes (national average) | 14,698 | – | 3.0 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 3.6 |
For scale, CMS's largest nursing home groups include Genesis HealthCare (184 homes, overall 2.3), Life Care Centers of America (194 homes, overall 3.4), PruittHealth (96 homes, overall 3.0), The Ensign Group (344 homes, overall 3.2).
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Nursing Home Chain Performance Measures. U.S. government data; no endorsement by CMS is implied. Ratings are updated monthly by CMS and refreshed here when we review this page. To see a specific nursing home, owner and its own rating, use Medicare Care Compare.