HOW THE LISTS ARE BUILT

The reports take their group lists from carehome.co.uk’s Top 20 lists and describe no selection of their own, apart from the outlier exclusions below. The 2023 small edition used carehome.co.uk’s 2022 small list. The 2023 mid-size and large editions used its 2023 lists, the 2024 editions used its 2024 lists, and the 2025 report names its list as the Top 20 Mid-size Care Home Groups 2025 as ranked by carehome.co.uk.

The reports do not say how carehome.co.uk ranks groups, and they give no home-count thresholds for small, mid-size and large. The home counts in the data run from 2 to 8 for small groups, 10 to 20 for mid-size groups (9 to 18 in the 2025 report) and 10 to 278 for large groups. The bands overlap: Care South has 20 homes and is mid-size in 2024, and Caring Homes has 20 homes and is large in 2024.

Lists are not always 20 groups long. The 2023 mid-size table has 21 groups, the 2023 large table has 20 ranked groups, and the 2025 report charts 19.

The count covers five platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter, which the 2024 and 2025 editions call X. For each group it adds the followers of the group’s own accounts to the followers of every account belonging to each of its homes. The reports do not say where each group’s list of homes came from, and they do not say whether the Facebook figure is page followers or page likes.

A row’s total is the sum of its platform counts. The combined figure is the group’s own accounts plus all its home accounts. The reports also publish a group-accounts-only figure, and these pages offer both rankings. The published ranking is the combined one.

Groups are ranked on the combined total, highest first. No tie rule is stated. The 2025 text says Oakland Care and Richmond Villages shared fifth place with 57 articles each, while the charts give them separate ranks. Rank labels in the reports were typed by hand, and in the 2024 large edition the labels for ranks 11 to 14 are out of order by total. These pages compute positions from the totals.

A home with no identifiable account carries a zero. The reports note that about 150 of the 1,284 homes in the large groups and 70 of roughly 280 mid-size homes had no account, often because a group runs one account for all its homes. A zero can therefore mean no account, one shared account, or a group that was not searched.

Where a workbook and the printed text disagree by a few units, these pages use the workbook. Peverel Court Care in the 2023 small edition is 1,670 in the workbook and 1,656 in the report text, and this site shows 1,670.

Facebook counts are rounded in the source data. Of the Facebook counts of 1,000 or more, every one is a multiple of 100 in the 2023 mid-size edition and in all three 2024 workbooks, and 80 per cent are in 2023 large and 88 per cent in 2023 small. That fits a public page that shows a count such as 1.4K. A total can therefore be out by up to 50 for each Facebook page above 1,000 followers. Group pages with counts of 10,000 or 13,000 in the 2024 large edition look rounded to the nearest thousand, which allows an error of up to 500 each.

No workbook exists for the 2025 edition, and the 2024 mid-size PDF matches neither of its workbooks exactly. For those figures we measured the bar lengths in the published charts, which are vector drawings, and converted them with the chart axis. The results agree with every printed figure to within about 60 followers. Carebase, for example, measures 43,810 against 43,800 printed.

These pages mark every figure read from a chart with a tilde and print it as read. Article counts with a tilde are whole numbers read from chart bars. Figures from a workbook or from the report text appear in full, without a tilde.

Only the 2025 edition measures media coverage. Its window is July 2024 to July 2025. Coverage is classed as local, trade or national, and corporate coverage means articles about the wider care group rather than a single home. Home-level and corporate articles both count towards a group’s total. The report states more than 900 articles, of which 73 per cent were local, 20 per cent trade and 7 per cent national. Reading the chart bars gives 908 articles across the 19 groups.

The report does not state which media monitoring tool was used, the search terms, how duplicates and syndicated copies were handled, or who classified each article. It does not publish the underlying article lists. The 2025 text and charts also differ in a few places: the text puts Berkley’s corporate coverage at 12 where the chart shows 14, and Black Swan’s 1.44 articles per home is the local-only figure, because all coverage over 18 homes gives 1.9.

Three parent organisations were kept out of a ranking by hand because the editions judged them statistical outliers. Cygnet Group was removed from the small lists in 2023 and 2024, Royal Star & Garter from the small list in 2023, and Bupa Care Homes from the large list in 2023. In the 2023 small, 2023 large and 2024 small reports the headline total includes the excluded group while the ranking and the percentage splits leave it out. Barchester Healthcare was not excluded in any edition, and no mid-size group was excluded.

We flag these groups instead of hiding them. Each has a profile page that says why it is not ranked: Cygnet Group, Royal Star & Garter and Bupa Care Homes. The exclusions were applied by judgement, edition by edition, and no written rule sits behind them. A live ranking needs one, and it has not been set.

The editions ranked homes as well as groups, and these pages list every home in the data: 1,539 homes belonging to 55 groups. Home figures are carried over from the latest published edition that included the home and are shown with the month they were captured, so a home’s figure is not a live count unless its page says it is. Mid-size homes carry the 2024 figures because the 2025 report named its homes without publishing their accounts.

305 of the 1,539 homes have no public social account that we could find. They are listed, without a rank, and their own pages are not indexed by search engines. Many are served by one account that the group runs for all its homes. LinkedIn is almost entirely a group-level platform, so a home’s total is mostly Facebook.

We list care homes as businesses and publish only the public pages they run. No individual’s data appears on these pages.

The 2024 mid-size list exists in two forms. The PDF published in August 2024 used data collected in July 2024. A refresh followed in December 2024, with group and brand accounts collected again and issued in a press release for Care Home Professional. The two differ by more than 50 followers for 18 of the 20 groups. Signature Senior Lifestyle, for example, is about 16,738 in the July version and 21,459 in the December one.

These pages treat the published PDF as the edition of record and show the December figures as a note on each group’s history. The 2025 report compared itself with the December version. The ranks in the two versions agree for every group that appears in both, so movement is the same either way.

Every published edition was a single-day manual capture. The workbooks hold one date per sheet at best and no per-row collection date. This table is generated from the figures behind these pages.

The 2024 mid-size group and brand accounts were re-collected in December 2024 for the refresh. The 2025 edition used August 2025 for followers and July 2024 to July 2025 for media.

Each edition ranks a different set of groups. The mid-size lists for 2023 and 2024 share 12 groups, and those for 2024 and 2025 share 14. The 2023 and 2024 large lists share 16 of their 20. Groups also move between bands: Signature appears as Signature Care Homes in the 2023 large list and as Signature Senior Lifestyle in the 2024 and 2025 mid-size lists, and Black Swan Care Group is large in 2023 and mid-size in 2024 and 2025. Year-on-year comparisons of platform share, such as LinkedIn’s rise in the mid-size list, compare shares of different groups.

Collection months differ between editions, and the 2025 report lists 19 groups where earlier mid-size reports list 20 or 21. Read a movement as a change of position within a list, not as a growth rate.

Live figures will not be directly comparable with printed editions. They will come from a different collection process from the single-day captures behind the print, and the accounts counted may differ. A gap between a live figure and a printed one is not a measure of growth.

If you run a group in one of these lists and think a figure is wrong, or you want to put context beside your entry, use our contact page. Tell us the group, the edition and the figure you question, and we will check it against the source.

This page and the group profiles are the places a correction would appear.