# Lodestone Eldercare Guide

> A free directory of U.S. elder care: every Medicare-certified nursing home (federal CMS data — star ratings, abuse flags, fines) plus state-licensed assisted living & residential care, across all 51 U.S. jurisdictions (50 states + D.C.). 125,278 providers in all. Public records gathered in one place, each linked back to its official source. No tracking, no lead-generation, no pay-to-rank; safety data is never reordered by money.

## Coverage
- 51 jurisdictions. 125,278 providers = 14,690 nursing homes + 109,759 assisted living/residential care + 829 NYC community & in-home programs.
- 3,044 county pages.
- Nursing data: CMS Care Compare. State-licensed care: each state's official licensing records. Retrieval dates vary by state — every page carries a freshness stamp.

## How the site is organized (URL patterns)
- One page per state: https://lodestone.guide/{st}.html (e.g. https://lodestone.guide/ga.html). Care-type tabs with stable anchors: #nursing, #assisted-living, #community.
- One page per county: https://lodestone.guide/{st}/{county-slug}.html (e.g. https://lodestone.guide/ga/fulton.html) — that county's nursing homes + state-licensed care.
- Sitemap: https://lodestone.guide/sitemap.xml

## Machine-readable data
- Per-state JSON (as used by the site): https://lodestone.guide/data/site_data/states/{ST}.json (nursing) and {ST}_care.json (state-licensed care).
- National summary CSV: https://lodestone.guide/data/lodestone_national_summary.csv
- Per-state markdown mirrors (token-cheap): https://lodestone.guide/md/{st}.md (e.g. https://lodestone.guide/md/ga.md)
- Per-county markdown mirrors: https://lodestone.guide/md/{st}/{county-slug}.md (e.g. https://lodestone.guide/md/ga/fulton.md)
- Data & sources page: https://lodestone.guide/data.html

## Freshness
- Snapshots are dated per source. The site does NOT claim a fixed refresh cadence yet — trust the per-page dated stamp.

## Citation
- Public records, free to use. Please cite "Lodestone Eldercare Guide" and link the page you used; verify any figure against the linked official source.
- Corrections / data questions: contact@lodestone.guide

## Key pages
- Directory home: https://lodestone.guide/index.html
- Data & sources: https://lodestone.guide/data.html
- How this works / methodology: https://lodestone.guide/about.html