Inspection recency bands each location's time since last check against a target review date: 6 months following an Inadequate rating, 12 months following Requires Improvement, or 30 months following Good or Outstanding, per CQC's own published guidance, or 24 months as a default where no rating is held. Locations within 90 days of that target review date, but not yet past it, are shown as due soon; those past it are overdue.
Analysis of CQC data
The three charts below all draw on the full stock of CQC's currently published data across all time periods, not a live or day-by-day position: an aggregate picture built from every rated location (31,770 rated locations, for the rating bands chart) and every categorised location (56,616 locations, for the recency and time-since-inspected charts) recorded in CQC's bulk downloads. These figures update only when SDWH refreshes the underlying snapshot, not continuously.
A small number of these locations (47 of the 56,616) fall under the category “Other”: specialist services that sit outside CQC's standard published category list, dominated by two clusters — residential colleges providing combined education and residential care for young people with disabilities, autism or sensory impairment (for example Beaumont College, Portland College and Treloar College), and hyperbaric oxygen or diving medicine treatment centres (for example the Midlands Diving Chamber and the Centre for Defence Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine).
Inspection Recency by Category
Nationwide share of locations in each category by inspection recency band, using the same recent/due/overdue definitions as the map above. Each bar totals 100%; locations can carry more than one category, so are counted once within each category they belong to.
The four bands are: Recently inspected — more than 90 days from its target review date; Due soon — within 90 days of that target review date, but not yet past it; Overdue — past that target review date; and No inspection date — no inspection date recorded at all in CQC's bulk download. Target review dates are set from CQC's own published intervals, applied to each location's current rating: 6 months following an Inadequate rating, 12 months following Requires Improvement, 30 months following Good or Outstanding, or 24 months as a default where no rating is held, per CQC's own published guidance.
Figure 1: inspection recency, 100% stacked by category
All 56,616 categorised locations nationwide, current snapshot
Categories are ordered by total location count (largest first). "No inspection date" covers locations with no recorded inspection in CQC's bulk download, which is concentrated in categories such as diagnostic/screening and remote/phone advice services that are less likely to receive a traditional on-site visit.
Time Since Last Inspection by Category
The same nationwide population, banded instead by a fixed, category-independent measure of time since each location's last recorded inspection — not by CQC's rating-dependent target intervals, which is what the chart above uses. Each bar totals 100% of that category's locations.
Figure 2: time since last inspection, 100% stacked by category, fixed time bands
All 56,616 categorised locations nationwide · measured against the 22 July 2026 care-directory snapshot date · ordered by total location count (largest first)
Bands are fixed calendar-time thresholds (under 6 months, 6–12 months, 1–2 years, 2–5 years, 5+ years, never inspected), applied the same way to every category regardless of its rating or CQC's target inspection interval for that rating. This is a different cut of the same underlying data to the recency-by-category chart above: that one measures each location against its own rating-dependent due date, this one measures every location against the same fixed clock.
Rating Bands by Category
Among locations that CQC has actually rated on its Overall five-key-question scale, the share falling into each rating band, by category. Each bar totals 100% of that category's rated locations only — it excludes not-rated locations, so is not directly comparable to the recency chart above.
Figure 3: CQC rating bands, 100% stacked by category, rated locations only
31,770 rated locations nationwide · ordered by number of rated locations in that category (largest first)
Rated-location counts vary hugely by category, from 13,773 (care homes) down to single figures. Dentists (57 rated), Other (34), Blood and transplant (24) and Prison healthcare (8) are based on very small samples and a handful of ratings can shift their bars substantially — treat these four as indicative only, not statistically robust. Care homes, home care and GP services have the largest, most reliable rated samples.
Methodology
Locations and providers are drawn from CQC's public care directory (22 July 2026 snapshot). Ratings are drawn from CQC's published Overall-domain ratings (1 July 2026 snapshot) — only locations assessed under CQC's five-key-question framework carry an Overall rating; most other service types show as not rated on this specific scale, not necessarily unassessed by CQC more generally. Postcodes are resolved to their current (2024 boundary review) Westminster parliamentary constituency via postcodes.io, itself built on ONS's National Statistics Postcode Lookup. Each location's raw CQC service-type tags are grouped into a short set of categories (Care homes, GP services, Dentists, Home care, Hospitals, Hospices, Clinics, Community services, Ambulances, and others) aligned to CQC's own published "Services we regulate" categories, rather than shown as CQC's internal, sometimes duplicated tag combinations.
A single location in this dataset (IV Wet Room Ltd, a mobile IV-drip wellness service) carries a Cardiff postcode and so falls in a Welsh constituency, despite CQC's remit otherwise covering England only. This is not a postcode-resolution error — the provider is genuinely registered with and regulated by CQC from a Cardiff base, per CQC's own published register — so it is retained rather than excluded.