England CQC Hospital Ratings: Currency and Coverage

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Colour dots by

Age of rating Rating

Rating

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Inspection category County / unitary area Rating age

Area shading

Share of a county’s rated locations whose rating was published in the last three years.

75% or more rated recently

50–75%

25–50%

under 25%

Grey: fewer than five rated locations

This measures how current a county’s ratings are, not how good its hospitals are. Publication date is not always assessment date.

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–hospital locations

About this map

What to look for. Filter to ratings published over five years ago and almost everything left is favourable: 356 of 390 are Good or Outstanding, and every rating older than ten years is. The oldest judgements in the system are the reassuring ones. The house icon on the map returns you to the whole of England at any point.

CQC is working on this — but not here. In May 2026 CQC published age triggers for prioritising re-inspection: over 6 years for adult social care, 7 for primary care, and 3 to 8 for mental health depending on the rating. Hospitals are the only sector with no published age threshold. CQC’s priorities.

Not every location is a hospital in the everyday sense. CQC registers services at location level, and its hospital sector is wider than the word suggests: alongside NHS acute and mental-health hospitals it registers independent providers such as ophthalmology, diagnostic and cosmetic surgery clinics. Each location’s inspection category is shown in its popup.

This map is not a CQC product. It was built by Adriaan van Heerden from CQC’s published directory and ratings data, with boundaries from ONS. CQC has no involvement in it.

Ratings are published by the Care Quality Commission for England. “Not rated” means no overall location rating is present in the supplied data. County / unitary area is the CQC location local authority. Point locations use postcode centroids. Where locations share a postcode centroid, their dots are separated visually so each remains selectable. Area scores always use all rated locations in the snapshot, not the dot filters.

Corrections since the snapshot. King’s Mill Hospital was re-rated Good on 15 July 2026 and has been updated here; the underlying snapshot recorded it as Outstanding. Other locations may have changed since 1 July 2026.

Data: CQC · boundaries: ONS · basemap: OpenFreeMap and OpenStreetMap contributors.

Read this before reading the map. A published CQC rating is an aggregate of service-level judgements made at different times, sometimes years apart, under two different assessment frameworks. The publication date is often not the assessment date. Two locations shown in the same colour may not be comparable. This map is a picture of what has been assessed and when — not a ranking of quality.

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England CQC hospital ratings: currency and coverage