Assisted Living Costs $5,830 A Month. Or $6,200. The Gap Is The Point.

Two Honest Numbers, $370 Apart

Ask what assisted living costs in America and you will get a confident answer. The problem is that you will get a different confident answer depending on who you ask, and the gap between them is large enough to move a valuation.

CareScout's 2025 Cost of Care Survey puts the national median for an assisted living community at $6,200 a month, or $74,400 a year. That figure comes from a provider survey fielded from July through November 2025, in which CareScout completed roughly 16,000 surveys across all care types, 4,944 of them from assisted living communities, contacted by phone and email across all 50 states and the District of Columbia (CareScout, 2025 Cost of Care Survey).

A Place for Mom publishes a national median of $5,830 a month, drawn from what it describes as its own proprietary data, on a page last updated July 29, 2026 (A Place for Mom, "Cost of Assisted Living," updated July 29, 2026).

Both numbers are defensible. Neither is wrong. They are $370 a month apart, which is about 6.3% of the lower figure and $4,440 a year per resident. That spread is not noise to be averaged away. It is the first thing an investor should understand before using either number for anything.

Why The Numbers Disagree

The two sources are measuring different things.

A provider survey asks operators what they charge. It captures a rate card: the published monthly price for a defined unit, sampled across whichever providers answered. It is the right tool for tracking what the industry asks and how that moves year over year. It says nothing about what a resident actually paid after a move-in concession, and it cannot tell you the level-of-care fees stacked on top of base rent, which in assisted living are often the difference between a profitable resident and a break-even one.

A referral platform's data reflects the communities in its own network and the families moving through it. That is closer to transaction reality in one sense, because it is anchored to real placements. But it carries the platform's own geography and price-point mix. A network weighted toward mid-market communities in lower-cost states will print a lower national median than a survey that reaches more urban, higher-acuity providers, without either being inaccurate.

A Place for Mom's own state data shows how much that mix matters. Its most expensive jurisdiction, the District of Columbia, runs $7,956 a month; its least expensive state, Louisiana, runs $4,429 (A Place for Mom, updated July 29, 2026). The top is roughly 80% above the bottom. A national median sits on top of a distribution that wide, and shifting the weight of the sample by a few markets moves it by hundreds of dollars.

The Headline This Week Was About Affordability

The reason these numbers are circulating now is a round of coverage framing assisted living as the most affordable long-term care option as costs rise. The CareScout data supports the comparison, but the framing deserves a closer look than a headline gives it.

On CareScout's 2025 annual figures, assisted living at $74,400 compares with $114,975 for a semi-private nursing home room and $129,575 for a private room. Assisted living is about 35% below the semi-private figure and about 43% below the private room (CareScout, 2025; percentages computed by Crawford Commercial Group).

The closer comparison is home care. CareScout prices a non-medical caregiver at $80,080 a year, and assisted living comes in about 7% below that. But the caregiver figure assumes 44 hours of care a week (CareScout, 2025). A week has 168 hours. Forty-four hours is about 26% of the week. The comparison holds for a senior who needs help for part of the day and is safe alone the rest of it. For a resident who needs someone present around the clock, the home-care side of the ledger is several times larger, and assisted living is not marginally cheaper, it is dramatically cheaper.

For an owner, that is the actual demand argument. Assisted living does not win on price against a few hours of help a day. It wins on price against continuous supervision, which is exactly the acuity band where resident needs are highest and where the level-of-care fees that national medians leave out are earned.

Why $370 Matters In A Valuation

Here is illustrative arithmetic. The rent inputs are the two published medians; the building and the cap rate are assumptions chosen to make the point, not market figures.

Take a 60-unit assisted living community at 88.4% occupancy, which is NIC MAP's second-quarter 2026 assisted living figure for its 31 primary markets (NIC, "Senior Housing Occupancy Climbs in Second Quarter 2026," July 20, 2026). That is about 53 occupied units. A $370 monthly difference across 53 units is roughly $235,000 of annual revenue.

Revenue is not net operating income, and this is where underwriters get into trouble. Suppose only half of that difference reaches NOI. At an assumed 7% cap rate, about $118,000 of NOI is worth roughly $1.7 million. The number you picked for the market rent, before you looked at a single resident ledger, just moved the value of a 60-unit building by more than a million and a half dollars.

That is why a national median belongs in a market memo and never in an underwriting model.

What To Underwrite To Instead

The rent roll, not the rate card. In-place rents, by unit type, with the concessions and the date each resident moved in. The gap between what long-tenured residents pay and what new move-ins are charged tells you more about pricing power than any national figure.

Care revenue separately from base rent. Level-of-care fees are frequently the swing factor in assisted living economics, and neither of these medians captures them. If the seller cannot break them out, that is itself information.

Local comps at the same acuity. Assisted living with a memory care wing is a different product from a light-care building down the street, even if both are licensed the same way. Compare like to like.

The supply picture behind occupancy. NIC reported assisted living inventory up only 0.3% from a year earlier in the second quarter of 2026, with overall senior housing inventory growth below 1% for the fifth consecutive quarter (NIC, July 20, 2026). Tight supply is why occupancy keeps rising. It is not, by itself, evidence that a specific building can push rent.

The Bottom Line

The assisted living "median" is not a price. It is two or more different measurements, taken from different samples, that happen to share a name. CareScout's $6,200 and A Place for Mom's $5,830 are both useful and both honest. Treat the gap between them as a reminder that national averages describe an industry, not an asset. When a broker, a pitch deck or a headline quotes the number, the right follow-up question is always the same: whose number, measured how, and what does the rent roll actually say?