By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · July 15, 2026
Almost every facility has deficiencies. A report with none is unusual enough to be worth a second look. Here is where to find Texas survey records, how to tell a paperwork citation from a real problem, and what to ask on the tour.
Where the reports actually live
Texas publishes this free and most families never look. There are two state tools and they show different things, which is the first thing to get straight.
TULIP, at tulip.hhs.texas.gov, is the current licensing system. Use it to confirm a facility holds a live licence, what type it is, and whether it carries an Alzheimer's certification. The legacy Long-Term Care Provider Search at apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch is where inspection history and cited deficiencies sit. If you only check one, you will either know the licence status with no history, or history with no idea whether the licence is current.
For nursing facilities only, pull the federal record too. Medicare Care Compare carries CMS star ratings, and data.cms.gov has the bulk files if you want to compare several facilities at once. Care Compare staffing figures are payroll-based rather than self-reported, which makes them more trustworthy than they used to be.
Texas assisted living does not appear on Care Compare at all. It is state-regulated only and carries no federal star rating. Families routinely misread that absence as a clean record, or assume a community is unregulated. Neither is true.
What a Texas survey is, and how often it happens
For nursing facilities, HHSC surveys on roughly an annual cycle and on two separate tracks. The Health survey looks at care, staffing, medication, dignity, and the clinical record. The Life Safety Code survey looks at the building: fire systems, exits, sprinklers, alarms, construction. They are different inspections producing different documents, and a facility can look very different on each.
Deficiencies publish with a cited date and a corrected date. That pairing is more informative than the citation itself, and we will come back to it.
Assisted living is inspected on its own state schedule rather than the federal one, and complaint investigations happen whenever a complaint is substantiated enough to warrant one. That means an assisted living record can contain routine survey findings and complaint findings side by side. Read which is which. A complaint investigation means someone was concerned enough to call the state.
Know what licence you are reading about
Texas licenses assisted living as Type A or Type B, and the distinction is about evacuation, not about how sick residents are. This surprises almost everyone. Under 26 TAC 553.5, a Type A resident evacuates without physical assistance from staff, does not require routine attendance during sleeping hours, and can follow directions in an emergency.
A Type B facility may serve residents who need help evacuating, who require attendance during the night, or who need help transferring to a wheelchair. A Type B resident must not be permanently bedfast. So a Type B licence tells you what the building is permitted to handle, not that the care is better or worse.
Memory care is not a licence type in Texas at all. It requires a separate Alzheimer's certification under 26 TAC 553.27, which sits on top of a Type B licence. Getting it requires both an on-site health inspection and a Life Safety Code inspection, and it caps the number of residents the certified unit can hold.
This matters when you read a report, because a citation about locked-unit staffing or resident supervision reads differently at a certified Alzheimer's facility than at a Type A building that should not have accepted that resident in the first place. Confirm the licence type and certification in TULIP before you interpret anything.
The four things that actually matter
Severity. A missing signature on a training form and actual harm to a resident appear in the same document, formatted identically, with the same visual weight. Read what the surveyor observed, not the citation count. The narrative is where the information is, and it is usually written plainly.
Repetition. The same deficiency cited across consecutive surveys tells you something a single citation never will. One is an incident. Three is a system. Scan the tags across two or three survey cycles before you form a view of any single one.
Correction. Reports show cited and corrected dates. A facility that corrects in two weeks is behaving differently from one that lets the same finding sit for months. This is a proxy for management attention, and it is one of the few things in the record that is genuinely comparable between buildings.
Recency and ownership. Administrators and owners change, sometimes often. A three-year-old pattern under previous management may not describe the building today, and a clean recent record under new ownership may not have been tested yet. Ask directly: who owns this now, when did that change, and how long has the administrator been in the role?
What a normal report looks like
Most well-run communities have citations. Kitchen temperature logs, care plan documentation that lags behind a change in condition, a training record that lapsed, a med cart left unlocked for a few minutes. These are real requirements and they are worth correcting, but they are not the same category as a resident who eloped or a medication error that caused harm.
A report with no deficiencies at all is not automatically the best building on your list. It may mean a small facility, a recent survey with a narrow scope, or a quiet year. Look at the survey date and the type of survey before you read anything into a blank record.
The pattern worth worrying about is not one bad citation. It is a run of findings that all point the same direction: call lights, staffing, supervision, falls, weight loss. Individually each looks minor. Together they describe a building that is short-handed.
If you read a report and genuinely cannot tell which category a citation falls into, that is a good question to bring to the administrator rather than a reason to cross a facility off. How they answer is itself informative.
Bring it up on the tour
Ask the administrator about a specific citation you read. Not aggressively, just directly: I saw this in your last survey, can you tell me what happened and what changed?
A good operator will answer in detail, because they lived it and they fixed it. They will usually tell you more than you asked, including the part that was genuinely their fault. Deflection, visible surprise that you looked, or an insistence that the surveyor simply misunderstood is worth weighing.
Follow it with two questions the report cannot answer. What is your caregiver turnover, and who is on the floor at 3am on a Sunday? Staffing at the worst hour of the week explains more about a building than the marketing tour does.
Then go back unannounced, mid-afternoon on a weekday. Compare what you see against what you read.
If you already have a concern about a facility
If someone is currently living in a licensed facility and you are worried, HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake takes reports at 1-800-458-9858, Monday to Friday, 7am to 7pm Central. That is the line for licensed settings: assisted living, nursing facilities, and other licensed providers.
The Texas Abuse Hotline at 1-800-252-5400 is a different line, staffed 24/7, and it covers community settings rather than licensed facilities. Non-urgent reports can go through txabusehotline.org. Using the wrong line costs time, so match the setting.
The long-term care ombudsman is the resource most families do not know exists. For Austin and the surrounding counties, that is the Capital Area Area Agency on Aging at 512-916-6054 or 888-622-9111 option 3, located at 6800 Burleson Road, Building 310, Suite 165, Austin 78744. They cover Travis, Williamson and Hays plus seven more counties. Ombudsman services are free and confidential, and they advocate for the resident rather than the facility.
One caution: the Area Agency on Aging of Central Texas in Belton is a different organisation covering Bell, Coryell, Hamilton, Lampasas, Milam, Mills and San Saba counties. If you are in Austin, Georgetown or San Marcos, you want the Capital Area office.
A workable order of operations
Confirm the licence and any Alzheimer's certification in TULIP. Pull two or three survey cycles from the legacy provider search. For nursing facilities, add Care Compare and look at the payroll-based staffing numbers.
Read the narratives rather than counting tags. Note anything that repeats. Note how fast things get corrected. Write down two specific citations to raise on the tour.
Then judge the building with your own eyes, informed by what you read. The record is a set of questions, not a verdict. Families who use it that way make better decisions than families who either ignore it or treat one citation as disqualifying.