What California RCFEs are actually cited for

Data as of 23 September 2026 · next scheduled update December 2026

We pulled the state’s public licensing export for all 13,230 licensed residential care facilities for the elderly and ranked every citation by regulation — emergency plans, drills, training, records, fire clearance and everything else. The whole table is below, and most of it has nothing to do with us.

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13,230

licensed RCFEs

7,298

with citations

56,890

citation records

13,302

in the last 12 months

One citation record = one regulation cited at one facility, matched to its Plan-of-Correction date. A single licensing visit can therefore produce several records, and a facility can appear more than once in any row below.

The ranking

Top 20 regulations by citation volume, last 12 months

Citations issued between September 2025 and September 2026. Highlighted rows are the sections covering emergency planning, drills, records and fire clearance — the part of the book we work in. They are 6.0% of the total.

#	Section	What it covers	12 mo	Share	90 d
1	§87465	Incidental medical and dental care services	1,737	13.1%	416
2	§87303	Food service	1,241	9.3%	321
3	§87468	Personal rights of residents	897	6.7%	224
4	§87411	Personnel requirements and training	694	5.2%	163
5	§87309	Personnel records	635	4.8%	162
6	§87463	Resident health condition / record of ongoing care	525	3.9%	136
7	§1569.695	Emergency and disaster plan — including quarterly drills on each shift	472	3.5%	117
8	§87555	Resident records	459	3.5%	112
9	§87412	Administrator qualifications and duties	441	3.3%	105
10	§87355	Modifications and exceptions	439	3.3%	109
11	§87211	Personal rights	437	3.3%	93
12	§87506	Appraisal / reappraisal of residents	392	2.9%	102
13	§87608	Dementia care — staff training	341	2.6%	104
14	§87307	Health-related services	300	2.3%	88
15	§87458	Resident appraisal	290	2.2%	72
16	§87464	Resident health services	258	1.9%	56
17	§1569.625(b)(2)	—	250	1.9%	58
18	§87202	Fire clearance	240	1.8%	64
19	§87405	—	193	1.5%	62
20	§1569.618(c)(3)	—	142	1.1%	25

Sections shown without a description are ones we could not label with confidence, so they are published as the bare number rather than a guess.

See where your facility stands in 90 seconds.

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The finding

The emergency-plan statute is the 7th most-cited regulation in the book

Health & Safety Code §1569.695 drew 472 citations in twelve months and 117 in the last ninety days. It ranks above fire clearance, above resident records, above administrator qualifications.

That surprised us, because §1569.695 is usually discussed as the evacuation-chair rule. The chair is one line of it — subsection (f)(1). The section also requires a written plan, two shelter locations with one outside the immediate area, keys available on every shift, staff training at hire and annually, a drill each quarter on every shift, documentation of each drill with the date, the emergency type and the names of staff who took part, and a signed annual review.

A facility can own six chairs and still be cited under this section. The chair is equipment. The rest is a system: a plan that is current, training that happened, drills run on every shift, and records that show it. Buying hardware answers one line of the statute.

Method

How this was built, and what it can’t tell you

Source is the CDSS Community Care Licensing public bulk export for residential elder care facilities, pulled 23 September 2026. Each facility row carries a comma-separated list of citation section numbers and a parallel list of Plan-of-Correction dates.

143 rows were dropped because their two lists were different lengths. Pairing them anyway would have dated citations wrongly, so they are excluded rather than guessed at.
The Plan-of-Correction date is a proxy for the citation date. It is the closest date the export carries, so timing is approximate and short windows should be read as indicative.
Subsections are rolled up to the parent section. This data says which section was cited, not which part of it.
It says nothing about what operators know or intend. A citation is a finding at a point in time, not a verdict on a facility.

The underlying export is free to anyone; we just added it up. The ranking is downloadable below so you can check the arithmetic against your own pull.

If this is your section

You can buy a chair. You can’t buy a system.

We equip and run the operational side of §1569.695, not just the one line of it that happens to be hardware: evacuation chairs at the stairwells, transfer slings, backup power, 72-hour supplies, the training, the quarterly drill playbook, and the records an analyst asks to see. One vendor, one purchase order.

What we don’t do is sign your plan or answer to your licensing analyst. Compliance stays with the licensee. Our job is that when the analyst asks, the equipment is where it should be, the staff have been trained on it, the drills have been run on every shift, and the paperwork is in your hand.

The honest disclosure: we sell that. We published the full table anyway, including the 94% of citations we have nothing to do with, because a table that only showed our sections would be worth exactly nothing to you.

Find your facility’s readiness gaps

Eight questions, about 90 seconds. It scores your evacuation, power, supplies, training and documentation, and tells you which of them you could evidence today and which you couldn’t.

Run the Readiness Score Read §1569.695 in full

The data

Take it and check our work

Source: CDSS Community Care Licensing public bulk export (Residential Elder Care Facility)
Retrieved: 23 September 2026
Coverage period: September 2025 – September 2026 (12 months) · 90-day column is June – September 2026
Unit: One record = one regulation cited at one facility, matched to a Plan-of-Correction date
Scope: All 13,230 licensed RCFEs in the export, statewide
Next update: December 2026

Download the table (CSV)Read the method Report an error

Free to quote, cite or reproduce with a link back. If you find an error we’ll correct it on this page and say what changed.

Data: CDSS Community Care Licensing public export, retrieved 23 September 2026. Statute text: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. Free to quote, cite or reproduce with a link back.