How RCFEIntel compiles California RCFE records

The single source is the California Department of Social Services, Community Care Licensing Division (CCLD), through its public Care Facility Search. CCLD is the state agency that licenses and inspects Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly. The same records are available to anyone, one facility at a time, on the state's site.

We do not combine the state record with reviews, marketing listings, or operator submissions. When a facility operator claims a profile, their photos and description appear in a clearly separate section and never replace or hide a state field.

For each facility in the state's RCFE list, we store:

• Identity: state facility number, facility name, address, city, county, phone, and the CCLD district office responsible for it.
• License: status as the state labels it (Licensed, Pending, Probationary License, the several Closed and Application categories), licensed capacity, first-licensed date, license effective date, and closure date where present.
• People: the named administrator and licensee of record.
• Visits: total state visits, split into inspection, complaint, and other visits, with the dates the state lists for each, and the most recent visit date.
• Citations: Type A and Type B citation counts from inspections, complaints, and other visits, as the state totals them.
• Complaints:the state's aggregate complaint count and its aggregate counts of substantiated, inconclusive, unsubstantiated, and unfounded allegations. Separately, each individual complaint record the state publishes: control number, approval date, the outcome counts for that complaint, its citation counts, and visit dates.
• Legal actions: whether a state legal action is active, its type, pleading date, and whether the case is closed.

Fields are stored as the state publishes them. The only transformation for display is title-casing names and addresses that the state publishes in capitals.

We pull the complete statewide list once a day, in the early morning Pacific time. The state itself typically updates its records about once a week, with most bulk changes landing early in the week, so a change the state publishes appears here within one day.

Every facility page states the date of the state record it reflects ("Record as of ..."). If a facility page is showing a record older than the latest pull, a notice at the top of the page says so.

Each day's pull is a snapshot. We compare it field by field against the previous complete snapshot and log every difference with the date it was detected, the field, the old value, and the new value. The log is what the city and county pages summarize and what vendor subscribers see in full.

Change types, and what they mean:

• New facility. A facility number appears in the state list for the first time. Because the state lists applications before licensure, a new entry is a pending license application, not an open facility, unless its status says Licensed.
• Possible ownership transfer. A new application at the address of an existing, non-closed facility. We label this "possible" because the state record does not say why; address reuse is the only evidence.
• Status change. The license status field changed, for example Pending to Licensed, or Licensed to one of the Closed categories.
• Leadership change. The administrator or licensee name changed.
• New complaint record. A complaint control number appears that was not in the prior snapshot.
• Compliance activity. Visit counts, visit dates, or citation counts changed.
• Legal action.The state's legal-action fields changed.
• Closure.The state record moved to a Closed status, or the facility left the state's list entirely. Disappearances are subject to the safeguards in the next section.

A public data source can return an incomplete answer. Since July 2026 the pipeline applies three checks before anything from a new snapshot is published or emailed:

• A pull that returns no facilities, or fewer than 90% of the previous day's count, is marked failed and discarded. Nothing is compared against it and the public pages keep serving the last complete snapshot.
• If a day's comparison would produce an implausibly large number of closures, those closure entries are withheld rather than published.
• The weekly vendor email refuses to send if any section exceeds a sanity cap, and the operator is alerted instead.

These checks exist because of a specific failure: on July 27, 2026, the state's service returned an empty list, and before the checks were added, that empty pull was briefly treated as a mass closure in a subscriber email. A correction went to every recipient the same week. Public facility pages were not affected because they already fell back to the prior record.

• Headline complaint counts on every page are the state's own aggregates. We never compute them from the individual complaint rows, because the state occasionally revises or removes a complaint record and the aggregate is the authoritative figure.
• "Substantiated" means the State of California reached that finding. It is not RCFEIntel's assessment.
• The text of an allegation is never published here. Only the state's outcome counts are.
• Where the state publishes a placeholder instead of a count for an allegation category, the page says the detail was not published, rather than showing a number.
• All compliance data is cumulative over a facility's entire licensing history. A count from 2011 sits next to one from last month. None of it describes current conditions or quality of care.

• One source. If CCLD is wrong, we are wrong. We have no independent way to verify a state field, and we do not try to.
• Lag. Up to one day on our side, plus however long the state takes to post a change. Enforcement actions in particular can post weeks after the event.
• Pricing and availability. The state does not collect either, so neither appears in the record. The free advisor service on facility pages exists to get that answer from the facility directly.
• City pages merge same-named cities. The state does not tie a city to a county in a way we can rely on, so a city page may list facilities from more than one county. Each row shows its county when that happens.
• History starts in March 2026. Change logs begin when daily collection began. The state's own cumulative counts reach back further than our change log does.
• Closed facilities stay listed. A facility that closes keeps its page, marked closed, because the state keeps its record and people keep searching for it.

• Not a rating, ranking, or recommendation of any facility.
• Not a consumer reporting agency. The data may not be used for employment, credit, insurance, or housing decisions.
• Not a substitute for the state record. Before making a care decision, verify the facility directly with CCLD.
• Not affiliated with or endorsed by the State of California.

Email ryan@rcfeintel.com with the facility name and state facility number. We re-pull the state record. If our page disagrees with the state, we fix it. If the state record itself is wrong, the correction has to be made with CCLD, and we will point you to the district office that holds the file.

Suggested form: "California Department of Social Services, Community Care Licensing Division, facility records, via RCFEIntel (rcfeintel.com), record as of 2026-09-19." Each facility page shows its own record date.

Read more about who runs the site on the about page.