The California assisted living safety report: what 7,800 facilities tell us

This is the spine piece of our California city safety reports. Browse the individual city reports or read the methodology behind the FYI Safety Score.

California has more licensed assisted living facilities than any other state. Roughly 7,872 are currently published and accessible on AssistedLiving.fyi, with a combined licensed capacity of about 205,000 beds. We computed a FYI Safety Score for every one of them from the public California Community Care Licensing Division inspection record. Here is what that data shows about safety across the state, where families have real options, and where they should look harder.

The average safety score across 7,845 scored facilities is 7.88. The distribution sits in the upper half of the 1.0-to-10.0 scale, but the variation between the best and worst facilities is enormous, and the differences between regional markets are larger than most families would guess.

The 7 Perfect 10 facilities in California

A Perfect 10 is an earned distinction. It requires at least 5 years of licensing, at least 10 state visits, zero citations across the entire record, and zero substantiated complaints. Fewer than 0.1% of California facilities currently qualify.

The 7 facilities holding a Perfect 10 right now:

1. Brookdale Mirage Inn, Rancho Mirage. 145 beds, 20 years licensed, 12 state inspections.
2. Affordable Board and Care Inc., Lakeview Terrace. 6 beds, 4 years licensed, 9 inspections.
3. Glenbrook Assisted Living, Carlsbad. 95 beds, 22 years licensed, 13 inspections.
4. Davis Guest Home #8, Salida. 80 beds, 7 years licensed, 13 inspections.
5. Palm Villas, Redwood City. 49 beds, 16 years licensed, 9 inspections.
6. Eskaton Lodge Granite Bay, Granite Bay. 118 beds, 10 years licensed, 18 inspections.
7. Right Choice Senior Living LLC - La Mesa, La Mesa. 6 beds, 4 years licensed, 9 inspections.

These 7 facilities are notable for a reason. Each has accumulated years of state observation, often at meaningful scale, without a single citation or substantiated complaint on the record. That is what the Perfect 10 measures and why it is rare.

What the statewide distribution looks like

Roughly 57% of California assisted living facilities score Good or Excellent. About 13% score Poor or Severe. The Fair band (6.0 to 7.9) is large, nearly a third of the state, and is the part of the market where the facility-by-facility detail matters most. A Fair score isn't a verdict; it's a starting point for asking specific questions.

How California cities rank by average safety

We computed individual reports for 19 California cities. Their relative rankings by average safety score:

A few observations from this ranking.

The Central Valley dominates the top. Modesto leads at 8.34. Fresno sits at 8.02. Stockton at 7.76. These are smaller markets with relatively high concentrations of strong facilities.

The Bay Area has more variation than people expect. San Francisco at 7.62, Oakland at 7.66, San Jose at 7.66, Fremont at 5.97. Fremont in particular is the lowest-scoring market in our 19-city analysis; it has zero Excellent-rated facilities. Within the Bay Area, the market depends heavily on which city you're looking at.

LA County is split. Long Beach (7.85) and LA proper (8.07) sit above the state average, while Glendale (7.58) and Pasadena (6.85) sit notably below. Pasadena's average is the second-lowest in our entire 19-city analysis.

Riverside is unique. It's the only major California city we've analyzed with zero facilities in the Severe band. Above-average overall and unusually well-bounded at the bottom.

A note on what the data does and doesn't tell you

The FYI Safety Score is a regulatory-compliance signal. It measures what state inspectors have documented: citations, substantiated complaints, severity, recency. It is not a measure of staff kindness, food quality, activity programming, or whether a particular facility is the right fit for your parent's specific needs. The score is one important data point. The visit is irreplaceable.

What the score is genuinely good at: surfacing facilities where the public record contains either a long history of clean state observation or a substantial body of recent findings worth asking about. Both of those signals are publicly available but historically very hard to read in their raw form. Our work has been to make them readable.

Where to go from here

If you're researching a specific California city, the per-city reports are the starting point. Each lists the top 15 facilities by safety, the score distribution across the local market, and the most-concerning facilities where the public record warrants extra attention.

For families researching what to actually do with safety score data once they have it, the companion guides are Why Yelp reviews don't predict quality of care, How to do a safety vibe check without trusting marketing, and How to read a California state inspection report.

Browse all California assisted living facilities by safety score on the AssistedLiving.fyi map.

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Data: Computed from California Department of Social Services Community Care Licensing Division (CCLD) inspection records, ingested into AssistedLiving.fyi as of May 2026. The FYI Safety Score is provided for informational purposes only and is not a guarantee or prediction of the safety, quality, or suitability of any facility. Always visit in person before deciding.