How we source and verify

Every phone number, agency name, and program detail on our state pages comes from a federal or state government source, or from a federally-administered nonprofit. We date everything. Below is a plain-English explanation of where it all comes from, why we trust it, and how often we re-check.

Where the data comes from

• State Units on Aging — the master list at acl.gov, cross-verified against each state’s own aging-department website.
• Area Agencies on Aging — we point readers to the federal Eldercare Locator (1-800-677-1116), which routes by ZIP code, rather than try to keep ~620 local AAA numbers current.
• Adult Protective Services — sourced from each state’s official APS or Department of Human Services page. There is no federal directory; we verify each number on the state’s own site.
• Long-Term Care Ombudsman — from the federally-funded National LTC Ombudsman Resource Center. One program per state, very stable.
• State Medicaid offices — from medicaid.gov and each state’s Medicaid agency. We don’t reproduce HCBS waiver details (they change too fast); we link to the state’s official page.
• SHIP (Medicare counseling) — from shiphelp.org.
• Senior legal aid — from the ProSeniors Senior Legal Hotline Directory and lawhelp.org.
• Demographic data — from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Caregiver-prevalence figures, where available, come from the CDC’s BRFSS Caregiver Module.

What we don’t use

• Senior-care matchmakers like A Place For Mom or Care.com. They take referral fees from facilities, and that creates a conflict of interest we’re not willing to import.
• Aggregator sites with no clear provenance.
• 211 search results as fact. 211 is useful as a phone option (call 211 from any U.S. phone for general local-service referrals); the underlying data is crowd-sourced and we don’t republish it as authoritative.
• Old PDFs, even on .gov domains, if they look more than a couple of years stale.
• Social media listings.

How often we re-verify

• Weekly: automated link-checker catches dead URLs and 404s.
• Quarterly: a human calls each phone number, confirms the agency still exists at that number, and updates the “last verified” date on the page.
• Quarterly (or as needed): Census data refreshed from the latest ACS 5-year release.
• Continuously: reader corrections via [email protected].

What you’ll see on each page

At the bottom of every state page you’ll find a “last verified” date. That’s the oldest verification across all the contacts on that page. If something looks wrong — a number that no longer reaches a real agency, an agency that’s been renamed or absorbed — please tell us. We’d rather fix it than leave it sitting there.

One thing this site is not

This site doesn’t replace a real conversation with a doctor, lawyer, or financial advisor who knows your situation. The numbers we list are starting points, not endpoints. For decisions that matter, you’ll want a professional — and we’ll keep saying so.