Texas keeps a free, public record of every nursing home and assisted living facility's inspection history. Most Houston families never know it exists until after they need it — here's exactly how to search it before your first tour.
Quick answer: Go to HHSC's free Long-term Care Provider Search, search by the facility's name or by city/county, open its detail page, and look at the "last inspection" date and the list of cited deficiencies. That page also shows ownership, licensed capacity, and Medicare/Medicaid participation. For assisted living facilities in Texas that's the primary public record. For a Medicare/Medicaid-certified nursing home, cross-check the same facility on Medicare's Care Compare, which adds star ratings for staffing and quality measures that the state tool doesn't calculate.
Most Houston families find out a facility's inspection history exists the hard way — after a move-in, after something goes wrong, or after another family mentions it in passing. It doesn't have to work that way. Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) publishes inspection and licensing information for nearly every regulated long-term care setting in the state, and it's free to search before you ever schedule a tour.
This walkthrough covers exactly how to use HHSC's Long-term Care Provider Search for a nursing home, assisted living facility, or day program anywhere in Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Waller, or Chambers county — what the results actually tell you, what they don't, and what to do if you find something that concerns you.
Why this is worth ten minutes before a tour
A facility's marketing materials and its regulatory record are two different documents. The brochure describes the aspiration; the inspection history describes what a state surveyor actually found on a visit. Neither one alone tells the whole story — a single old citation that was corrected quickly means something very different from a pattern of repeat findings in the same area year after year. Reading the record before your tour gives you specific, informed questions to ask on-site instead of relying entirely on impressions from a scheduled visit, which is the one day the facility is guaranteed to be at its best.
Two ways to search the HHSC tool
The Long-term Care Provider Search gives you two entry points, and it's worth knowing both because they surface different things.
Search by location
Enter the city, county, or ZIP code where you want services, then choose a service type from the dropdown. This is the better option when you're still building a list of facilities to consider rather than checking one you already have in mind. The searchable provider types include:
- Nursing homes (skilled nursing facilities)
- Assisted living facilities
- Intermediate care facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ICF/IID)
- Day activity and health services (adult day programs)
- Home and community-based support services agencies
- Prescribed pediatric extended care centers
Search by name
If you already have a facility in mind — say, one a hospital discharge planner or a friend recommended — you can search by entering at least three letters of its name, optionally narrowed by provider type. This is the faster path once you have a short list.
Step-by-step: looking up one Houston facility
- Go to apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch.
- Choose location search (enter your Houston-area city or ZIP and pick a service type, such as "Assisted Living Facility") or name search (type the facility's name).
- From the results table, click the facility's name to open its detail page. The results list is sortable by clicking the column headers if you're comparing several facilities at once.
- On the detail page, note the licensed capacity, ownership or chain affiliation, and whether the facility participates in Medicare and/or Medicaid.
- Find the inspection or survey section and check the date of the most recent inspection listed.
- Read through any deficiencies or violations cited, along with the compliance area each one falls under (for example, Health and Life Safety Code categories).
- Compare what you're seeing against the statewide compliance averages shown on the same page — that context matters more than a raw citation count, since surveyors cite something at nearly every visit to nearly every facility.
What the detail page actually shows you
Once you're on a specific facility's page, expect to find:
- Ownership and chain affiliation, if the facility is part of a larger operator
- Licensed or maximum capacity
- Whether the facility accepts Medicare and/or Medicaid
- The date of the last inspection or survey
- The number of violations or deficiencies found at that inspection
- Statewide compliance averages, so you can see whether a facility's numbers are typical or unusual
- The specific violations cited, organized by date and compliance area
What counts as a "deficiency," and why one citation isn't the whole story
A deficiency is a specific finding that a facility fell short of a licensing or Life Safety Code requirement during a survey — it can range from a paperwork or documentation gap to a finding that directly affected resident care. The tool typically shows you the citation and the compliance area, but the full narrative — what the surveyor actually observed, and what corrective action the facility took — usually isn't spelled out in the summary view. Before drawing conclusions, look for a pattern: the same type of citation repeating across multiple inspection cycles is a very different signal than a single, isolated finding that shows no repeat the following year.
What this tool does not hand you directly
The public search gives you the inspection and licensing summary, but it is not the same thing as the full complaint or investigation file. If you want the underlying investigation report for a specific complaint against a facility, that's a separate records request handled through HHSC directly — by fax, email, or mail, using the contact information HHSC provides for that purpose. It takes longer than a web search, but it's the route to the full narrative behind a citation you want to understand in more depth.
For a Medicare/Medicaid-certified nursing home, check Care Compare too
If the facility you're researching is a Medicare and/or Medicaid-certified nursing home — not an assisted living facility, which Medicare does not certify or rate — it's also worth pulling up the same facility on Medicare's Care Compare tool. Care Compare assigns a 1-to-5 star rating across four categories: health inspections (based on the three most recent annual inspections plus complaint-driven inspections over the last three years), staffing (registered nurse hours and total staffing hours per resident day), quality measures (drawn from clinical data the nursing home reports), and an overall rating that weighs all three together. It's a useful second data point precisely because it's calculated differently than HHSC's raw inspection listing — but remember it only exists for nursing homes, so it won't help you evaluate an assisted living community, a memory care residence, or a board-and-care home.
Reading the record the way a placement advisor does
A few habits make this exercise more useful than just scanning for red flags:
- Weight recent findings more heavily than old ones — a citation from several inspection cycles ago that hasn't recurred tells you the facility corrected the problem.
- Look for repetition in the same compliance area across cycles, which suggests a systemic issue rather than a one-time lapse.
- Compare the facility's numbers to the statewide averages shown on its own page rather than assuming any citation at all is disqualifying — Texas surveys thousands of facilities, and most visits produce at least one finding somewhere.
- Bring specific questions from what you read into your tour. Asking "I saw a citation related to medication administration from last year — can you walk me through what changed?" gets you a far more useful answer than a general "how's your care here?"
If you find something that concerns you
If your own visit or the inspection history raises a genuine concern about a current resident's safety, you can report it directly to HHSC's Consumer Rights and Services complaint line at 1-800-458-9858. That's separate from simply reading the public record — it's how a new concern gets investigated rather than just observed.
Checking a facility's inspection history is one piece of a much larger decision, and it's easy to lose an afternoon jumping between the state tool, Care Compare, and a facility's own website trying to line everything up. If you'd rather talk through what you're finding with someone who does this for Houston-area families every week, call (346) 385-3815 — it's a free conversation, and there's no obligation attached to it.
Last updated August 29, 2026. This guide is general information for Greater Houston families, not medical, legal, or financial advice.
