List of Care Homes in the UK (2026): How to Get a Fresh, Complete Database

Here's a number that surprised even us: the UK residential care market is worth roughly £27.3 billion a year. That's not a niche. That's a small country's economy, run out of buildings on quiet suburban streets. And on the 1st of August 2026, Scrap.io indexed 11,523 care and nursing homes across the UK that you can actually contact today.

So why is a decent list of care homes in the UK so annoyingly hard to get hold of?

I'll be honest with you. Most people go looking for a ready-made file, buy something dodgy off a data broker, and end up with a spreadsheet that's a quarter dead on arrival. There's a better way — and it doesn't involve a shady CSV or a £900 invoice. This guide walks through the real 2026 numbers, where the "official" lists come from (and why you can't export them), and how to build your own fresh UK care homes list in a few clicks.

How many care homes are there in the UK? (2026 numbers)

Depends who's counting. Genuinely.

The Care Quality Commission — the regulator for England — had roughly 14,780 registered care homes on its books as of June 2026, and 82.7% were rated Good or Outstanding (CQC, State of Care). Split them and you get around 4,186 homes with nursing and about 10,301 without nursing (CQC, March 2025). That's England only, mind.

Now widen the lens to the whole UK, and look at what's actually contactable — a phone that rings, an email that lands, a website that loads. That's where Scrap.io's live count comes in: 11,523 care/nursing homes pulled from Google Maps in real time (August 2026). Here's how that breaks down.

Why doesn't 11,523 match the CQC's 14,780? Because they're measuring different things. CQC counts registrations in England. Scrap.io counts live, contactable listings across the entire UK. Directories like carehome.co.uk (≈16,500 homes) and Care Choices (≈30,000 entries) are higher still, because they fold in home care, duplicates and historical records. None of them is "wrong." They're just answering different questions.

The lesson buried in there: a list is only as good as its source and its freshness. Keep that in your back pocket — it's the whole point of this article.

One more bit of context, because it explains why so many suppliers want this data. Occupancy sits above 86%, there's an estimated shortfall of around 40,000 beds by the end of 2026, and Savills reckons that gap could balloon to 200,000 by 2050 as the 85-plus population nearly doubles. Around 468,500 registered beds are run by roughly 7,338 operators today. Translation: this is a growing, high-value, fragmented market. Perfect for prospecting.

The two main types of care home

Before you build any care homes list UK segmentation, get this distinction straight — because it changes who you sell to and what they'll pay.

Residential home, or nursing home? Two different animals.

A residential home provides accommodation and personal care — help with washing, dressing, meals, medication. A nursing home does all of that and keeps one or more qualified nurses on duty around the clock for people with medical needs. That's the line the NHS draws too (NHS care homes guide). Both are CQC-registered. Nursing homes usually run bigger budgets, because clinical care costs more.

There are other types of care homes too — dementia residential, learning disability, respite, plus various types of care homes for elderly residents specifically. But for a B2B database, residential vs nursing is the fault line that matters most. It tells you budget size, buying committee, and whether your pitch even lands.

Where official UK care home lists come from (CQC, NHS, directories)

Here's the counter-intuitive bit. The data is public. Very public. And almost entirely useless for prospecting.

The CQC's "Find a care home" tool is the closest thing to an official register of CQC-registered providers in England. You can search it. You can read inspection reports. What you can't do is tick "export to CSV with emails." It's built for families choosing a home for gran — not for a sales team building a pipeline.

Same story with the NHS guide, which mostly points you back to CQC and a couple of consumer directories. And the big directories? carehome.co.uk and Care Choices are excellent for what they do — helping people find care. They're not built to hand you a filtered, exportable list of registered care homes in the UK with structured contact fields.

So you've got a public "CQC list of care homes" you can look at but not use, and directories you can browse but not export. That's the gap. And it's a big one. If your question is simply how to find a care home for a relative, these tools are perfect. If it's how to build a prospecting list, they're a dead end.

Oh, and one more headache. These registers go stale. Homes open, close, change hands, rebrand. A list of licensed care homes in the UK that was accurate in January is quietly wrong by June. Which brings us to the next problem.

Top care home providers & groups in the UK (2026)

Everyone wants the top 20 care home providers UK list. Here's the thing most listicles won't tell you: the big groups are the exception, not the rule.

The largest operators — the ones you'll see on every care home providers list going — include:

1. Care UK
2. HC-One
3. Barchester Healthcare
4. Four Seasons Health Care
5. Bupa Care Homes
6. Anchor
7. Sanctuary Care
8. Care Choices / regional groups

What about the top 10 care homes in the UK?

If you're after the "best" individual homes — the top 10 care homes in the UK or the top 5 care homes in the UK by review score — that's what consumer awards from carehome.co.uk exist for. Useful for families. Not much use for a B2B list, because you're chasing eight names when your real market is eleven thousand.

Because here's the stat that should reframe everything: roughly 90% of UK care homes are independent or small operators. The famous groups own a slice. The long tail — thousands of single-site and small-chain homes — is where most of the addressable market actually lives. And guess who's easiest to reach, and least fought-over? The little guys. A national list of the biggest care homes in the UK misses them entirely. Your complete, filtered database doesn't.

The problem with buying a static care homes list

Let me tell you about Mark. (Composite of about a hundred people we've spoken to, but you'll recognise him.)

Mark runs sales at a care-tech startup. He bought a "verified" list of UK care homes — 900 quid, delivered as a spreadsheet, looked lovely. First send: a 25% bounce rate. Second send: his domain reputation in the bin. Turns out a chunk of contacts had left, retired, or never existed. The rest? Sold to three of his competitors the same week.

Sound familiar?

This isn't bad luck. It's how bought lists work. Industry benchmarks put purchased B2B lists at 10–30% stale on the day they're delivered, and B2B contact data degrades somewhere between 22.5% and 70.3% per year (Gartner / ZoomInfo figures widely cited across the industry). One marketer put it more bluntly in a well-known deliverability thread:

"DO NOT send to this list… even 3,000 emails can burn a hole in your rep… your sending domain name is also blacklisted, not just your IP." — B2B email marketing forum thread

That's the trap in one quote. Buy a static file, and you're renting decay. We've written before about why buying email lists in 2026 mostly doesn't work, and we made the same argument for the US market in our guide to retirement home email lists. The fix is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: stop buying a snapshot. Generate the list at the moment you need it.

How to build a live UK care homes list from Google Maps (step by step)

Generate, don't buy. That's the whole philosophy.

Google Maps is, quietly, the most up-to-date business directory on the planet. Homes update their own listings. Reviews flow in. Closures get flagged. Scrap.io reads that live data and turns it into a clean CSV — filtered before you spend a penny. Here's the workflow.

1. Pick your category and area. Type "care home" (or add "nursing home", "residential care") and choose your zone — a city, a county, a region, or the whole United Kingdom in one go.
2. Apply filters before extraction. Want only homes with an email? Tick "email present." Only mobiles for an SMS campaign? Filter by phone type. You set the shape of the list first.
3. Check the free count. Scrap.io tells you exactly how many records match — no credits spent on counting, ever.
4. Export to CSV or Excel. Out comes a structured file: name, address, phone, classified emails, socials, ratings, website tech.

That's it. No code. Prefer to work straight from the map? The Scrap.io Chrome extension surfaces emails and socials directly on Google Maps. And if you're the type who wants the full walkthrough, the getting started guide covers every button.

What about a list of care homes in London?

London's a beast — over a thousand homes across 30-odd boroughs. A national file buries them. Instead, use GeoSearch: draw a radius around central London, or trace a polygon around a specific borough, and pull only what's inside. Same filters apply. So a list of care homes in London becomes a two-minute job, not a week of copy-pasting from a county directory.

Who sells to UK care homes? (real B2B use cases)

Short answer: loads of people. All 11,523 of those homes are somebody's account list.

Think about everything a care home needs to run. Care management software. eMAR and medication systems. Catering. Staffing agencies. Medical equipment. Reputation management. A website, for the third or so that still don't have one. Every one of those is a business that needs the same thing you do — a clean, current list of homes, filtered to the right segment.

Not convinced there's a market? Look at who's already built companies on this exact buyer:

• Person Centred Software (PCS) — personcentredsoftware.com — the most widely used care management platform in the UK, in 3,000+ care homes.
• Nourish Care — nourishcare.com — digital care planning.
• The Access Group (Health & Social Care) — theaccessgroup.com — a full integrated stack: care planning, eMAR, rostering, payroll.
• CoolCare — coolcare.co.uk — admin, occupancy and finance tools for operators.
• everyLIFE Technologies (PASS) — everylifetechnologies.com — care management for providers.

Five companies. One shared dependency: an accurate, segmented list of care homes. That's not a coincidence — it's the market telling you the data is worth having.

Filtering before you export

This is the part people underrate, so I'll be blunt: filtering before extraction is the difference between a smart campaign and a bonfire of your budget.

Most tools make you pull everything, then pay for the junk, then clean it yourself. Scrap.io flips that. You decide who you're not paying for, up front. Only want the 5,541 homes with a detectable email? Filter, and you never spend a credit on the rest.

You can filter on presence of website, email or phone; phone type (fixed vs mobile); rating and review count; whether the listing's been claimed; even whether the site runs an ad pixel. And here's a lovely inversion — the ~3,260 homes without a website? Flip the filter, and that's your prospect list if you sell web design. One person's "useless record" is another's warmest lead.

Is it legal? UK GDPR & PECR for care home prospecting

Is it legal? Yes — if you do it properly. Let's not be vague about it.

Scrap.io only collects publicly available business data, and every record is traceable back to its source. Under UK GDPR, B2B prospecting to a business generally relies on legitimate interest rather than prior consent — provided you're relevant, you identify yourself, and you offer an easy opt-out. PECR adds rules for electronic marketing; for corporate subscribers (a care home as an organisation), B2B email outreach is permitted with a clear unsubscribe route.

The practical version: contact businesses, not individuals' personal accounts; say who you are; make opting out one click; honour it. Do that, and prospecting UK care homes is squarely above board. Scrap.io itself is GDPR and CCPA compliant, with data traceable to source. None of this is legal advice, obviously — if you're unsure, run your programme past your DPO. But the model is a well-trodden path.

FAQ

How many care homes are there in the UK?

Around 14,780 care homes are CQC-registered in England (June 2026) — roughly 4,186 with nursing and 10,301 without. Across the whole UK, Scrap.io indexes 11,523 live, contactable homes on Google Maps (August 2026). The numbers differ because they measure different things: registrations versus contactable listings.

What's the difference between a care home and a nursing home?

A residential care home provides accommodation and personal care (washing, dressing, meals, medication). A nursing home does all that plus 24/7 qualified nursing for medical needs. Both are CQC-registered; nursing homes typically carry larger budgets.

Where can I get a list of UK care homes?

Public registers (CQC, NHS, local authorities) let you look up homes but not export them, and they hold no structured emails. For an exportable, filtered list with phones, classified emails and ratings, extract live Google Maps data with Scrap.io and download it as CSV or Excel.

Is it legal to use a care homes list for B2B outreach?

Yes, when you use publicly available business data, identify yourself, target the organisation rather than a personal inbox, and provide a clear opt-out — in line with UK GDPR (legitimate interest) and PECR. Keep your data traceable to source.

Who are the top UK care home providers?

Big names include Care UK, HC-One, Barchester, Four Seasons and Bupa. But about 90% of UK care homes are independent or small operators — which is exactly why a complete, filtered database beats a shortlist of the biggest groups.

Is there a list of care homes in the UK with visa sponsorship?

Some do sponsor overseas care workers, but that's a job-seeker question, not a B2B one — and it's not what this guide covers. This article is about building a prospecting list of care homes as business accounts, not finding employment. For sponsorship, check the government's register of licensed sponsors instead.

The bottom line

A good list of care homes in the UK isn't something you buy. It's something you generate — fresh, filtered, and yours. The public registers show you the homes but won't let you export them. Bought lists rot before you've finished importing them. And a national market of 11,523 contactable homes, 90% of them small and under-pitched, is sitting right there on the map.

Stop renting stale lists. Try Scrap.io free for 7 days — 100 leads included — and pull your first UK care homes export live, today.