The UK care home market in numbers

How big is the UK care home market?

CQC registers 14,878 care homes in England with around 485,000 registered beds between them, an average of about 33 beds per home. That bed stock is the operational supply behind the sector, and on a Fair Cost of Care basis (£61,000/bed per bed, LaingBuisson, 2024) it represents tens of billions of pounds of specialist property and trading businesses.

Occupancy across mature homes held at 88.7% (Knight Frank, FY2024/25), and the all-care average weekly fee was about £1,298/wk (Knight Frank, FY2024/25). Those trading metrics, not bricks alone, are what lenders and investors underwrite.

How fragmented is care home ownership?

The market is unusually fragmented. We track 1,616 operators running two or more homes, yet the ten largest groups account for only about 58,861 beds between them, a small share of the national total. That long tail of small and single-home operators is exactly why consolidation and platform acquisition dominate sector M&A.

Where are the beds?

Bed supply is concentrated in the larger English regions. The table below ranks regions by registered bed stock from the same CQC data.

Source: Care Quality Commission care directory, 03 June 2026. Contains public sector information from the Care Quality Commission, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.