Assisted Living
Daily support while maintaining as much independence as possible.
Typically hands-on help with bathing, dressing and medications, in their own apartment. Services vary by community.
- Free
- No signup
- No email for your result
- Private assessment
- No provider rankings
Start here
Four kinds of care, in plain English
These four phrases get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and the difference decides what your parent’s next few years look like — and what it costs.
Memory Care
Structured support for significant memory or cognitive changes.
Usually a secured setting with dementia-trained staff. The question is safety, not just help.
Skilled Nursing
24-hour nursing care for higher medical and physical needs.
Licensed nursing available around the clock. A medical setting, usually a room rather than an apartment.
Short-Term Rehab
Temporary nursing and therapy while recovering after illness, surgery, or hospitalization.
Weeks, not years, with going home as the goal. Medicare may cover a qualifying stay.
The option families overlook
Independent living is for when the house is the problem, not the person. Meals, housekeeping and transport, in a private apartment. These communities generally do not provide hands-on personal care, and typically have no nurse on the floor — though services vary by community. Families often skip past it and pay for care nobody needed yet.
Most families start looking the week after something happens. A fall. A hospital stay. A phone call from a neighbour.
You may be deciding something worth tens of thousands of dollars a year — and in some settings well past six figures — in a hurry, on the worst week of the year. The language is the first obstacle. Communities describe themselves in marketing terms, the state licenses them in regulatory terms, and your mother’s doctor speaks in clinical terms. None of those three are the same vocabulary.
Six questions · about two minutes
What level does your parent need?
Answer about the last few months, not their worst single day. The result shows you which answers produced it, so you can check the reasoning yourself.
Your answers are not sent anywhere. No account, no email, no record of what you chose — the assessment runs entirely in your browser. After the result there is one optional form, and it asks for no health information.
The number nobody says out loud
What senior care costs in Illinois
Statewide Illinois medians from the CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, published 2026. The Chicago metro runs above the state median, and every community prices its own way — these are numbers to hold a quote against, not a quote. Where no credible statewide figure exists, none is shown.
Assisted Living
Estimated Illinois Cost
$6,219/month
Illinois assisted living median.
CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, published 2026. View source
Base rates usually exclude care tiers. Ask what the rate becomes at the level your parent actually needs.
Nursing Home
Estimated Illinois Cost
$8,304/month
Illinois median, semi-private room. A private room has a separate median of $9,216 a month.
CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, published 2026. View source
Long-stay figures. The one level Illinois Medicaid may cover for those who qualify.
Memory Care
Memory Care Costs
The CareScout survey does not separately report an Illinois memory-care median, so no figure is shown here.
Memory care costs vary depending on location, accommodation type, staffing, and the level of assistance required. Request a detailed written estimate from communities you are considering.
Independent Living
Independent Living Costs
The CareScout survey does not report an Illinois figure for independent living, so none is shown.
Pricing depends on apartment size, the community, and which services are bundled into the monthly fee rather than billed on top. Ask for a written fee schedule.
Short-term Rehab
Short-Term Rehabilitation Costs
No statewide price is shown, because what a family pays depends on insurance, Medicare eligibility, length of stay and the services delivered. Long-stay nursing home medians do not describe a short rehabilitation stay and are not used here as a substitute.
Under Original Medicare, a qualifying stay may carry $0 daily coinsurance for days 1–20, then $217 a day for days 21–100 in 2026, after the applicable Part A deductible. Eligibility rules apply, and Medicare Advantage plans may differ. Confirm with your plan.
Statewide estimates are provided for general comparison and do not represent Westminster Place’s actual rates.
Here is the part that catches families. Traditional assisted living and memory care are usually private-pay. But Illinois runs a separate option: eligible residents can have their care services covered by Medicaid in a state-certified Supportive Living Program setting — including certified dementia-care settings.
Expect two charges, not one. The first is room and board, which stays the resident’s responsibility and is set by the state from the annual Social Security increase: $874 a month for a single-occupancy apartment and $625.50 for double occupancy, effective 1 January 2026 (HFS Provider Notice, 26 November 2025). The second is a group care credit, also called patient liability — an amount calculated from the resident’s countable income after allowable deductions, paid monthly toward the cost of care, with Medicaid covering the remainder. Most residents owe both. A resident avoids the group care credit only when their income equals the SSI amount, and keeps a $120 personal needs allowance either way (HFS Supportive Living resident fact sheet). So $874 is not the cost of living there — it is one line of it. It is a different kind of community with its own eligibility rules, so ask about it by name.
Free · nothing to download
Twelve questions to ask on a tour
Almost every community will show you the dining room and the activity calendar. These are the questions that actually separate them. Screenshot this.
- What is included in the base rate, and what is billed on top?
- How do you assess care levels, and how often does the price change as a result?
- What is the staff-to-resident ratio overnight?
- What is your care staff turnover in the last twelve months?
- What happens when my parent's needs exceed what you provide here?
- What happens if private funds run out?
- How are medications managed, and by whom — a nurse or care staff?
- How long has the current executive director been here?
- What was your last state survey, and may I see it?
- What happens at 2am if my parent falls?
- How much notice before a rate increase, and what was last year's?
- May I come back unannounced at a mealtime?
One more, and it is the most useful: visit late afternoon. Staffing thins, dementia symptoms often peak, and you see the community as it really runs rather than as it is presented at eleven in the morning.
About this guide
Who made this, and why there's nothing for sale
I work in Evanston. I kept watching families arrive at a decision this large already exhausted, holding four words nobody had ever explained to them. The explanation is not complicated. It just was not written down anywhere in plain language, for this town.
The assessment cannot be steered. It reads your six answers against published rules and returns a level of care — never a community. It asks nothing about who you are and it takes no fees from anyone. I work at Westminster Place in Evanston. After the result I show you their information, clearly labelled, alongside the state’s own licensed-facility directory so you can see every other option. I am not going to pretend to rank communities when I work at one of them.
This is a general guide, not medical advice and not a clinical assessment. Only a doctor, nurse or licensed care assessor can determine what level of care someone needs. Use this to understand your options and ask sharper questions — then confirm with a professional.
Sources & methodology where these numbers come from, and how the assessment decides
How the assessment works
It is an educational starting point, not a medical diagnosis. Your six
answers are matched against a short list of published decision rules,
in a fixed order, and the first rule that fits decides the category.
Those rules live in assessment.js on this site — you can
open it and read them. The result always quotes the answers that
produced it, so the reasoning can be checked rather than trusted.
What this site does not do
- No community is ranked, scored or compared. The assessment returns a level of care and nothing else.
- Nobody pays to influence a result. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, and no referral fee from any community — including Westminster Place, where I work.
- Your assessment answers are never collected, stored or transmitted. The assessment runs entirely in your browser and no health information leaves this device.
- There is exactly one place that collects anything: the optional tour-inquiry form shown after the result. It asks for a name, a phone number and an email address, and nothing else. If you tick the permission box, those details are passed by hand to Westminster Place Admissions so they can contact you about a tour, and a dated record is kept here showing the inquiry started on this site. It is kept completely separate from the assessment. Skipping it changes nothing about your result, and Westminster’s own form and phone number are on the page either way.
- Costs shown are published estimates and medians. Actual prices vary by community, apartment, care level and year.
- Coverage and eligibility rules change, and they depend on your parent's specific circumstances. Confirm anything that matters with the agency or plan directly.
Sources
- Medicare.gov — Skilled nursing facility (SNF) care Coverage conditions and the qualifying-stay requirement.
- Medicare.gov — Medicare costs 2026 Part A deductible and the daily coinsurance for days 21–100.
- Illinois HFS — Supportive Living Program What Medicaid covers in certified Supportive Living settings, including dementia-care settings, and the state room-and-board amounts.
- Illinois HFS — Home and Community Based Services The broader set of Illinois waiver programs and who they serve.
- Illinois Department of Public Health — Assisted Living How assisted living and shared housing are licensed in Illinois, and what those licences permit.
- Medicare Care Compare Inspection results and staffing data for skilled nursing facilities, before you visit one.
- Illinois HFS Provider Notice, 26 November 2025 — Supportive Living room and board The source for the $874 single-occupancy and $625.50 double-occupancy room-and-board amounts, effective 1 January 2026. The state sets these figures and adjusts them with the annual Social Security cost-of-living increase, so check for a newer notice before relying on them.
- Illinois HFS — Supportive Living Program resident fact sheet The source for the group care credit (patient liability) and the $120 personal needs allowance. Read it before assuming room and board is the whole bill: the state’s own wording is that most residents owe both a room-and-board charge and a group care credit.
- CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey, published 2026 The source for every Illinois figure on this page: assisted living at $6,219 a month, and nursing home medians of $8,304 semi-private and $9,216 private. The survey was conducted from July to November 2025. These are statewide medians, not quotes, and not the rates of any particular community. Two levels are deliberately shown without a figure — memory care and independent living — because this survey does not report an Illinois median for either, and a number nobody surveyed is worse than no number at all.
Figures and links last verified October 2026.