Pennsylvania Assisted Living Regulations and Records

When choosing an assisted living community, it is important to understand Pennsylvania state regulations for assisted living facilities and know how to look up assisted living license information. But public access to assisted living records varies greatly by state.

We developed a system to rate each state on how easy – or difficult – it is to find important assisted living records and reports, and compiled tips to help you in your search.

States with the most transparent records allow you to look up important information about each assisted living facility online, including inspections, complaints, survey results, violations, capacity, and whether the facility accepts Medicaid.

Access to Pennsylvania assisted living records: Exceptional

Public access to assisted living records and reports for the state of Pennsylvania is exceptional. Key findings that informed this rating include:

• The Pennsylvania state licensing website includes compliance and inspections reports dating back more than five years.
• Personal care home and assisted living records in Pennsylvania are highly transparent, having met all but one of the transparency criteria.

How to look up Pennsylvania assisted living licenses and records

• Records and information about providers classified as “assisted living” as well as record for homes classified as “personal care homes”, are available through the Human Services Provider Directory.
• Providers and inspection reports can be searched by region, county, zip code, and facility name.
• From the search results, select “Inspection Summary” to view the results of the most recent inspection of the community or previous inspections.

How we arrived at our Pennsylvania rating

We developed a standard methodology for state data collection and evaluation, and based our rating primarily on the objective, state-specific accessibility criteria outlined in these questions:

1. Are licensed assisted living communities listed online in any form? Yes
2. If Yes to #1, is the information updated frequently? Yes
3. If Yes to #1, is the list of licensed communities searchable? No
4. Does the state post inspections, complaints, survey results, or violations online? Yes
5. If Yes to #4, is the information updated frequently? [within 90 days] Yes
6. If Yes to #2 and #4, is the enforcement information included in the same place as licensed communities? No
7. If Yes to #4 and No to #6, are violations / inspections searchable at all? Yes
8. Is information about special licensing for care shown? No or N/A
9. Capacity shown? Yes
10. Payment types shown, [e.g. Medicaid, private pay]? Yes
11. Administrator / Contact name shown? No
12. State may fine facility? Yes
13. Frequency of inspections? Every 24 months
14. Website includes pricing of facility? No