How we score assisted living facilities in Charlotte

Charlotte Assisted Living Facility Guide currently scores 114 assisted living businesses in the Charlotte, NC area. Every score comes from a fixed rubric applied the same way to every listing. Nothing here is paid for and nothing is adjusted by hand after the fact. This page explains exactly how the number is built, why we weight things the way we do, and where the honest limits of that number sit.

The five signals, heaviest first

Each business gets a composite score from 0 to 100, built from five measured signals. We list them here in order of how much they count.

Sentiment, 28%

Sentiment is a synthesis of what recent reviews actually say: the themes that show up again and again, praise as well as complaints. This is the single biggest piece of the score, and for good reason. A star rating alone can hide a real pattern. Two facilities can carry the identical average, say 4.2 stars, while one has a string of recent reviews mentioning slow call-bell response or high staff turnover and the other doesn't. You would never see that difference by looking at the number alone. Reading what reviewers are actually describing is the only way to catch it, which is why we treat it as the most important signal rather than a footnote.

Rating, 26%

This is the Google aggregate star rating, the plain average most people check first. It matters, but on its own it is a blunt instrument: it doesn't tell you whether ten people or five hundred people left that rating, or whether the reviews are from last month or three years ago. That's why it sits alongside, not above, sentiment and volume.

Volume, 20%

Volume measures how many reviews a business has, log-scaled so that a facility with 200 reviews doesn't automatically dwarf one with 40 just because of raw count. Log scaling means the difference between 5 and 50 reviews matters a lot more to the score than the difference between 200 and 250. A handful of reviews, good or bad, just doesn't tell you as much as a real body of feedback, and the score reflects that.

Recency, 12%

Recency looks at how recently people have actually reviewed the business. Assisted living care changes: new administrators, new staff, new ownership. A facility that earned glowing reviews in 2019 and nothing since tells you less about today than one with a steady stream of recent feedback.

Completeness, 14%

This checks whether basic information is actually listed and correct: phone number, website, hours, and address. For a family trying to make contact or schedule a tour, missing or outdated basics are a real practical barrier, so we score for it directly.

Where the score runs low-confidence

Some facilities in our directory simply don't have much review history to draw on. When a business has too few recent reviews to support a reliable read, we label that score as low-confidence rather than pretend precision we don't have. We synthesize themes from reviews; we do not republish them word for word, and we always link out to Google so you can read the original source yourself and judge for it.

the team placement and editorial review, disclosed, never scoring

Scores come from this rubric and the underlying data alone. They are never edited by hand. Where paid placement exists anywhere on this site, it is always labeled as such and it never changes a score. Where a list's picks or order involved editorial judgment, such as our independent living best-of list, that is disclosed on the page itself.

Who publishes this and why

Charlotte Assisted Living Facility Guide is published by Great Work Research, an independent directory of senior care providers in Charlotte. It was founded by the team Burnett, a notary public and notary trust delivery agent whose work in estate planning showed him firsthand how difficult families find it to judge care providers at exactly the moment the decision feels most urgent. That's the gap this directory tries to close: rankings built on published review data and a methodology anyone can check, not on who paid for placement. Listings are drawn from public information, verified monthly, and any facility can request a correction at any time.

the team Burnett, Managing editor, maintains these rankings. Our data refreshes monthly, and each listing carries a "last verified" stamp so you can see the maintenance is active rather than one-and-done. Questions, corrections, or a facility you'd like us to look at: reach the team at info@reallygreatwork.com. You can also start from our home page to browse the full directory.