How to check a Minnesota care provider’s licence, inspections and ratings

First work out who licenses the provider

Almost every wasted hour in this process comes from searching the wrong database. Minnesota splits licensing between two departments, and the tools are not connected to each other. Before you look anything up, work out which agency licenses the kind of care you are looking at.

The four tools, and what each one is for

Once you know the agency, the routing is straightforward. Three of these tools are run by Minnesota, one is federal, and each answers a genuinely different question. Using only one of them is the usual reason two families reach opposite conclusions about the same building.

The practical rule: MDH answers "is this legal and what went wrong here", the report cards answer "how does this compare", and Care Compare answers "how does this compare nationally". You want at least two of the three before you sign anything.

Verifying a licence at MDH in a few minutes

MDH runs two entry points that overlap: MDH — Verify a Facility License and MDH Health Care Provider Directory. The directory is searchable by provider type, county, city or name, and shows licensure status, address and administrator.

MDH monitors assisted living facilities for compliance "mainly through inspections at least once every two years." That cadence tells you something useful about what a clean record does and does not mean: a facility inspected eighteen months ago with nothing since has simply not been looked at recently. Source: MN Office of the Legislative Auditor, Assisted Living Facility Licensing (2025).

Scale is worth knowing here too. As of June 2025 MDH had licensed over 2,300 assisted living facilities, and more than 1,200 of those were small facilities with a licensed capacity of five or fewer residents. Minnesota assisted living is dominated by very small homes, which matters for what the ratings tools can and cannot show you. Source: MN Office of the Legislative Auditor, Assisted Living Facility Licensing (2025).

Reading complaint and survey findings without a law degree

MDH publishes facility and provider complaint and survey findings online, and the Office of Health Facility Complaints handles regulatory complaints. Sources: MDH — Facility and Provider Complaint and Survey Findings, MDH Office of Health Facility Complaints.

Findings documents are written for regulators, which is why most families glance at them and give up. Three habits make them readable.

1. Read the pattern, not the count

A single correction order for a paperwork lapse in a well-run building is not the same signal as three separate findings about medication administration in eighteen months. Look for the same theme recurring, and for whether the issues touch care or clerical process.

2. Read what the facility did next

Findings normally sit alongside the correction the facility was required to make. A facility that fixed something quickly and has not repeated it is telling you something different from one that has been corrected on the same point twice.

3. Take the unanswered questions on the tour

The most useful thing a findings document produces is a short list of specific, dated questions to ask the administrator in person. Providers who deal with these straightforwardly are giving you real information; a provider who cannot discuss a public finding about their own building is also giving you information.

The Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card, and why some facilities show no stars

Minnesota has run a public Assisted Living Report Card since 2024 at alreportcard.dhs.mn.gov. It is a joint effort of the Minnesota Board on Aging and DHS with MDH, MNIT, Vital Research and the University of Minnesota, and the quality measures were developed by a research team at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Source: Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card (DHS).

The five rated domains

• Resident quality of life
• Family satisfaction
• Resident health
• Safety
• Staffing

Licensing survey results and substantiated maltreatment findings are also displayed on the report card, but they are not star-rated. Source: Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card — Fact Sheet and FAQs (DHS, updated April 28, 2026).

The stars are a curve, not a score

This is the part that changes how you read them. Ratings run from one star (lowest) to five (highest) and are assigned by how far a community sits from the average of its peers, measured in standard deviations: five stars means more than one and a half standard deviations better than the mean, or in the top 7% of facilities; four is half to one and a half above; three is within half a standard deviation of the mean; two and one are the mirror image below. Thresholds are fixed from the prior one year of quality-of-life survey data and two years of MDH licensure survey data, and updated yearly. Source: Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card — Ratings Guide (DHS, updated April 28, 2026).

And the peers are chosen deliberately

Communities are compared against similar communities, grouped by location — the seven-county Twin Cities area versus greater Minnesota — and by size. The size bands differ by measure: quality of life and family satisfaction use 1 to 25 beds versus 26 and over, while resident health, safety and staffing use 1 to 5, 6 to 25, and 26 and over. Source: Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card — Ratings Guide (DHS, updated April 28, 2026).

So a four-star rating means "better than most similar buildings of about this size in about this part of Minnesota". It does not mean "better than most buildings in Minnesota", and it is not comparable across peer groups.

Why a community may show no rating

DHS states that participation is mandatory for all licensed assisted living communities in Minnesota. Even so, you will encounter communities with no stars, or stars in some domains and not others, and the honest explanation is about data rather than misconduct. Source: Minnesota Assisted Living Report Card — Fact Sheet and FAQs (DHS, updated April 28, 2026).

• A domain needs data of the right kind. Resident quality of life and family satisfaction come from surveys, and a community that has not yet been surveyed has nothing to rate.
• The health, safety and staffing data collection began on July 1, 2024, so the underlying record is still comparatively short.
• Thresholds are set annually from a fixed window of survey and licensure data, so a newly licensed community will not appear in that window yet.
• Many of Minnesota’s smallest facilities are not yet rated — and with more than 1,200 licensed for five residents or fewer, the smallest facilities are a very large share of the market.

The practical consequence: an unrated home is not a bad home. Where stars are missing, put the weight on the MDH licence, the complaint and survey findings, and what you see and hear on two visits at two different times of day.

Nursing homes: two report cards that can disagree

Minnesota nursing homes appear on two rating systems. DHS runs the Minnesota Nursing Home Report Card, and every Medicare-certified nursing home also carries a federal star rating on Medicare Care Compare. Sources: Minnesota Nursing Home Report Card (DHS), Medicare Care Compare.

They can and do disagree, because they are not measuring the same thing on the same schedule. Neither is wrong when that happens — the disagreement is itself information, and the right response is to read the underlying inspection findings rather than to average the stars.

If a nursing home is on your list, the rate rules matter as much as the ratings: Minnesota bars a facility from charging private-pay residents more than the approved Medical Assistance rate for similar services. That is covered in the rate equalization guide.

Before you sign: the verification checklist

This is the sequence we would follow ourselves, in order, for any Minnesota provider.

The UDALSA requirement is one of the most useful and least known consumer protections in Minnesota, and it is the cleanest way to compare two communities on identical headings. Source: Minn. Stat. § 144G.40 — assisted living disclosure requirements (UDALSA).

Red flags that should stop a tour

• A provider who will not give you a licence number, or who becomes evasive when asked for the legal entity name.
• A community advertising memory care without an assisted living facility with dementia care licence.
• A request to sign a contract without receiving the UDALSA separately beforehand.
• Any suggestion that a contract waives liability for health, safety or personal property — Minnesota assisted living contracts cannot do that.
• Refusal to discuss a published inspection finding about their own building.

The contract rules behind two of those flags come from MDH’s own guidance on chapter 144G contracts: MDH — Assisted Living FAQs: Contracts (Minn. Stat. ch. 144G).

If something is already wrong

Verification is for before you sign. If care has already gone wrong, three free Minnesota services take it from here, and they do different jobs.

Sources: Minnesota Adult Abuse Reporting Center (MAARC), 1-844-880-1574 — MN Attorney General, MN Office of Ombudsman for Long-Term Care, MDH Office of Health Facility Complaints, Minnesota Aging Pathways (formerly the Senior LinkAge Line), 1-800-333-2433 — Minnesota Board on Aging. None of these services sells anything.

A note for providers about licence fees

Operators searching for this will find the wrong numbers almost everywhere. The fee schedule lives in Minn. Stat. § 144.122 — license, registration, and permit fees, not in chapter 144G, and paragraph (d) sets it at $2,000 plus $125 per resident for an assisted living facility and $3,000 plus $150 per resident for an assisted living facility with dementia care.

The widely repeated figures of $75 and $100 per resident are out of date and should not be relied on. There is no separate initial and renewal amount, and a revenue-neutral renewal adjustment of up to plus or minus 10% is allowed based on waiver-service composition. Certification survey fees are separate: $1,800 for home health agencies and $1,700 for hospice providers.

Confirm the current figures against the statute before budgeting — fee provisions are amended more often than most operators expect.

Where to look next

Every RightCare MN listing shows the licence number we hold on file, and says so plainly where we do not have one. Browse assisted living, nursing homes or adult foster care, or start from a place — Minneapolis or Hennepin County.

If you are still deciding between two kinds of care, assisted living vs nursing home in Minnesota sets out the licence difference in one table. If cost is the live question, start with what assisted living actually costs in Minnesota.