Iowa hosts 391 Medicare-certified nursing homes that participate in the CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System, each tracked by a unique six-digit CMS Certification Number (CCN) and evaluated on Health Inspection, Staffing, and Quality Measures components. Certification is required for any long-term care facility that bills Medicare or Medicaid for skilled nursing services, so this roster functions as a near-complete directory of the state's licensed SNF (skilled nursing facility) beds, excluded are assisted-living residences, independent-living communities, and memory-care units that operate outside the Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement system. According to CMS Nursing Home Care Compare and the National Provider Identifier Registry, covering more than 14,000 Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes with over 1 million certified beds and Five-Star Quality Ratings issued since December 2008 you can search and compare here, every figure traces to its source in our methodology.

The facilities on this page are paginated across 8 pages (50 per page) and sorted by CMS Overall Star Rating with highest-rated homes first, so if you're searching for the top-performing nursing homes in Iowa you can read from the top; if you're researching a specific facility name, use browser find or the search tool. Each listing shows the Overall star, the three component ratings (Health, Staffing, Quality), bed count, and county, drill into the facility's profile page for full deficiency counts, inspection cycle history, RN hours per resident per day, fines, and Special Focus or abuse-icon flags. Remember that identical Overall stars can mask very different underlying profiles: a 4-star facility with 1-star Staffing reads differently than a 4-star facility with 4-star Staffing.

CMS refreshes the Five-Star dataset monthly as new state surveys are uploaded, so ratings can shift between visits. Important: PlainDoctor presents these ratings exactly as CMS publishes them at data.cms.gov - no custom scoring, no rankings, no editorial adjustments. This directory is a starting point for research, not a placement recommendation or medical advice; choosing a nursing home for yourself or a loved one is a high-stakes healthcare decision that should involve in-person tours, staff interviews, reading the full survey deficiency reports, and consulting licensed clinicians, hospital discharge planners, and elder-care attorneys or advisors who understand the financial and Medicaid implications.