Make the best senior care decision

To help you plan and pay for senior care, it’s important to understand all the options available to you and your family. Senior living costs vary across care types and from community to community, mostly due to differences in services, amenities, and the level of senior care offered. Here’s a quick breakdown of the housing and care types referenced in the map:

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• Senior apartments are tailored to active, 55+ adults who prefer a low-maintenance lifestyle. They often offer access to amenities like fitness centers, pools, golf courses, or tennis courts. Senior apartment costs typically include rent, utilities, landscaping services, home maintenance services, and security.
• Independent living communities offer convenient, hassle-free living in a social environment for seniors who are active, healthy, and able to live on their own. The costs of independent living often include services like dining, housekeeping, social activities, and complimentary transportation.
• Assisted living communities offer housing and care for seniors who may need help with daily tasks such as bathing, dressing, mobility assistance, or medication management. In addition to help with daily activities, assisted living communities also include services like dining, housekeeping, social activities, and transportation. However, within a particular community, the costs of assisted living tend to vary according to room type, amenities selected, and the level of care needed.
• Memory care provides housing, care, and therapies for seniors who have Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia in a secure environment designed to reduce confusion and prevent wandering. The costs of memory care tend to be higher than other types of senior care, as memory care communities offer 24-hour, specialized dementia care from trained staff.

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The map was developed in collaboration with Matthew Harris, who holds a doctorate in economics and is an associate professor of economics at University of Tennessee.

Data sources

A Place for Mom’s senior living cost map is based on actual 2012-2018 rent and care charges collected from referred family move-ins to A Place for Mom community partners, and it includes inflation-adjusted zip-code-level median household data from American Community Survey five-year estimates. Additionally, the cost map uses median household income and 55+ population statistics from the Census API via the ACS package for the R statistical programming language.

Statistical analysis

Predictions for each region were derived from a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) model. Consumer cost estimates are based on a proprietary machine-learning algorithm that models inflation-adjusted first-month rent and care charges. ZIP codes with a small number of move-ins borrow information about costs from nearby ZIP codes with similar median household income and older adult population share. City, metro, state, regional, and national estimates are a weighted average of ZIP-code-level estimates. ZIP code weights are based on the most recent five-year estimates of population counts of older adults from the American Community Survey.

Cost growth estimates compare the median first-month rent and care charges for a given property and type of care to the median charges in the previous year for the same property and care type.

Note: Texas and Oklahoma estimates are unavailable, as APFM did not collect monthly care and rent charges due to state regulations.