Assisted living · Monthly cost · Updated Jul 20, 2026

The real price of senior care, city by city.

Every price below comes from a community’s own published rate sheet. We record where each one came from and when we collected it, then check it again before it goes on the page. You never have to give an email address to see a number.

Browse care costs by city Estimate your own cost
The Exploreist index Each bar is one metro’s price range. The bold mark is the median.
  1. Tucson, AZ 21 prices · 13 communities $4,695 median per month. Middle half $4,000 to $5,940. Full range $3,000 to $9,440.
  2. Phoenix, AZ 18 prices · 13 communities $4,721 median per month. Middle half $4,212 to $5,436. Full range $3,250 to $5,995.
  3. Colorado Springs, CO 14 prices · 10 communities $5,422 median per month. Middle half $4,639 to $5,991. Full range $4,130 to $7,950.
  4. Denver, CO 60 prices · 37 communities $5,745 median per month. Middle half $4,469 to $6,652. Full range $2,830 to $12,800.

median  ·  middle 50% of prices  ·  full range

Prices verified 113 prices from 73 communities across 4 metros How we collect prices

What the index shows so far

$1,050/mo

Which city you’re in moves the price most

Denver runs $1,050 a month above Tucson at the median, $5,745 against $4,695.

See the Denver data

2.6×

Same apartment, wildly different price

A two-bedroom in Denver, CO runs from $4,986 to $12,800. Same apartment type, same metro. An average tells you nothing about which end you would land on.

How we handle outliers

How a price gets on this page

Senior care pricing is opaque mostly because nobody collects it in the open. Three things happen between a community publishing a rate and that number appearing here.

Read the full methodology · See every source

  1. 1

    Read the published rate

    We take the figure from the community’s own fee schedule or price sheet, rather than from a survey or a pricing model.

  2. 2

    Record where and when

    Each price keeps its source URL, the exact wording it came from and the date we collected it. When a number gets old, the page says so rather than hiding it.

  3. 3

    Check it a second time

    A second pass re-fetches the page and confirms the number. In Phoenix it threw out two rates that did not hold up.

Where we’re starting

A metro only publishes once it clears the minimum data bar of eight verified base rates from separate communities. Cities that fall short stay unpublished until we have collected enough to be useful.

Colorado Springs is next, then the rest of the Mountain West and eventually 400+ U.S. metros. Memory care, nursing homes and home care follow the same bar.

The second dataset

Price is one question. Whether the home is any good is the other.

Medicare inspects every nursing home in the country and publishes what it finds: star ratings, nurse hours per resident, fines, inspection failures. It is public, and almost nobody reads it, because it arrives as a spreadsheet. We put each home on its own page and set its numbers against its state's.

Reading all 14,685 of them at once turns up something the per-home pages cannot show. Registered nurse cover falls 31% at the weekend, and 53.3% of homes staff below the level Medicare expects for their own residents.

Read the national staffing study Browse nursing homes by state

  • 84

    nursing homes with a page of their own, across Arizona and Colorado

  • 51%

    of them have been fined by CMS. Each home's penalty history sits on its own page

  • 3.6×

    between the best- and worst-staffed home in this set, measured in nurse hours per resident per day

CMS Care Compare, June 1, 2026. Homes missing too much of the record stay unpublished rather than shipping a page of blanks.

Free to cite and republish

Writing about senior care costs? Every figure here is yours to quote, chart or republish, as long as you attribute it and link back. You do not need permission and there is no licence to buy. If you need a city we have not published yet, ask us.

Methodology · Sources · Who we are

Cite this index

Exploreist, “Assisted living cost index,” July 20, 2026. https://exploreist.com/