Questions to ask on an assisted living tour

Every facility passes its own tour. Your job is to ask the questions the tour wasn't built for, and to watch harder than you listen.

Three tactics before any question

• Tour at 11:30am. You'll see lunch (eat it yourself), midday staffing (count heads), and residents at their most active.
• Drop by unannounced before deciding; a weekend evening shows you the facility nobody staged.
• Watch one staff–resident interaction end to end. Do they know the resident's name? Do they crouch to eye level? That's the culture, in one scene.

The questions that separate facilities

Staffing (ask these first): How many caregivers are on the floor right now, for how many residents? What's turnover been in the past year? Who's here overnight?

Safety: What happens, step by step, when a resident falls? What would make you ask a resident to leave? Can I see your last state inspection report? (Hesitation on that last one is itself the answer.)

Dignity: What does a typical Tuesday look like? Can residents wake and bathe on their own schedule? How do you handle a resident who says no?

Contracts (ask the business office, in writing): What's in the base rate versus extra? What triggers rate increases, and what were the last two years' increases? What happens if the money runs out?

Get all 25, printable

These are drawn from our free Facility Tour Checklist: 25 questions across staffing, safety, dignity, food, and contracts, with space to write what you saw. Print one per facility; by the third tour they blur together.