How we compile our data

Listings

SeniorHome.ca lists 7,250 senior living communities and care providers across Canada. Listings come from public sources: provincial licensing registries and government directories, Google Maps business listings, and communities' own websites. Communities can also claim their listing and correct it themselves.

We remove listings that aren't senior care (for example child care, unrelated businesses or closed homes), merge duplicates, and check that each listing's Google place, address, website and photos belong to that residence. Each listing has a category: retirement homes, assisted living, independent living, memory care, long-term care (nursing homes), home care, and supporting services such as clinics, pharmacies and associations.

Prices

Most prices on SeniorHome.ca are estimates. 2,349 listings show an estimated monthly cost, labelled “est.”, which is not a rate the community has published. 426 listings show a price the community published on its own website or entered itself; for website prices we keep the page the price came from.

We're replacing estimates with published prices as we find them, by checking each residence's website. A published price must appear word for word on the residence's own site, and must be a plausible monthly rate (we exclude purchase prices, deposits, and hourly or daily fees). Estimates are never used in our structured data for search engines. Averages and medians on our cost pages are calculated from these prices and are labelled as estimates. Always ask a residence for its current rates in writing.

Ratings and reviews

Star ratings and review counts are Google's public ratings for each place, shown as Google reports them. Reviews written on SeniorHome.ca are moderated for spam and abuse before they appear; we don't edit them, and a community can't remove a review it doesn't like.

Top-rated lists

City pages list the top-rated senior homes in each city. Only residences qualify (not home care agencies or services), and only those with at least 10 Google reviews. Homes are ranked by their Google rating weighted by the number of reviews: each rating is blended with a rating of 4.0 as if it had 25 extra reviews, so a 5.0 from 12 reviews doesn't outrank a 4.6 from 300. No one can pay to be in, or move up, a top-rated list.

Licensing and inspections

We show 4,187 provincial licensing records on listings, matched from public registries: the Retirement Homes Regulatory Authority (RHRA) register and the Ministry of Long-Term Care inspection reports in Ontario, the directory of certified private seniors' residences (RPA) in Québec, Alberta's continuing care compliance data (every inspection, audit and investigation, and open non-compliances), the BC Assisted Living Registry (registration and substantiated complaints), Manitoba's licensed personal care homes and standards reviews, Saskatchewan's personal care home inspections, and Nova Scotia's and New Brunswick's long-term care inspection reports. Records are matched to listings by postal code and street number, then by name, and refreshed monthly. We show current licences only, link to the official record and inspection reports, and don't score or interpret inspection findings.

Labels

• Verified: the community has claimed its listing and shows the SeniorHome.ca badge on its own website.
• Owner-managed: the community has claimed its listing and keeps it up to date, but hasn't added the badge.
• Featured: a paid placement. Featured listings are labelled and appear first in lists; see our editorial policy.
• est.: an estimated price, as described above.

Photos

Photos come from the community's own website, from Google (shown live from Google with attribution, never copied), or from Google Street View of the building. We don't use AI-generated images of real places.

Guides and articles

City and province guides and blog articles are written with AI assistance from our directory data and from public sources, which are cited. How they're produced and checked is described in our editorial policy.

Corrections

If something on a listing is wrong, the community can claim the listing and fix it, or anyone can tell us at info@seniorhome.ca or through our contact page. We correct verified errors promptly.