Personal care home

“Personal care home” is the license name Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania use for residential care. The phrase describes the service accurately: personal care, meaning hands-on help with the body and the day, as distinct from medical care.

What personal care means in a license

The regulated services are the activities of daily living. Bathing, dressing, grooming, toileting, transferring between bed and chair, and eating. Add supervision, meals, laundry, housekeeping, and medication assistance, and that is the license.

Skilled nursing is excluded. A personal care home is not licensed to provide wound care, injections, tube feeding, or the continuous nursing oversight a nursing home provides. Residents whose needs move into that territory usually have to move, though home health or hospice can sometimes come in from outside so a resident can stay.

The size range is wide, and states split it differently

Georgia licenses personal care homes at every size and separates them by capacity into family (two to six residents), group (seven to fifteen), and larger. The two-to-six category is the small residential model most families picture, and it is the majority of Georgia’s licensed homes by count.

Pennsylvania licenses personal care homes serving four or more residents, and runs assisted living residence as a separate, higher-service category. A Pennsylvania home licensed for four to eight residents is a small personal care home.

New Jersey uses a related name, the comprehensive personal care home, for a category with a higher service level.

What to check before you tour

Every state that uses this term publishes license status and inspection history. Georgia’s Department of Community Health and Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services both run searchable databases, and both publish enforcement actions.

Two things are worth asking on the first call, because they are not in the database. Ask what the home does when a resident’s care needs increase, and ask whether the home accepts Medicaid, because coverage for personal care homes varies sharply between these four states and the answer changes what you can plan for.

Our state directories link straight to the official lookup tool for each state, and every listing carries its license number so you can check it yourself.