Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Facility License
Mar 27, 2025
Starting an assisted living business is exciting, but before you can welcome residents, you need to get licensed. Think of this as your business’s official permission slip—it proves you meet safety, health, and care standards.
This guide breaks down the process step by step, so you can get licensed without feeling overwhelmed. Let’s dive in!
Check out the video, too:
Why Do You Need a License?
Your facility license is more than just paperwork—it’s what allows you to legally run your business. Without it, you can’t operate or accept residents.
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Legal Protection – Keeps you compliant with state laws.
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Builds Trust – Families want to know you’re licensed and following safety rules.
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Prepares You for Growth – Having a license makes it easier to secure funding and referrals.
Now, let’s go over how to get licensed the right way.
Step 1: Find Your State’s Licensing Department
Each state handles licensing a little differently, so your first step is finding the right agency. Depending on where you live, this might be called:
π State Health Department
π Department of Health & Human Services
π Department of Public Health
π Health & Welfare Department
π How to find it:
Search "[Your State] assisted living licensing" online. You should see a government website with all the details you need.
Step 2: Reach Out & Ask the Right Questions
Once you find the right agency, contact them directly. Here’s how:
π Call Them – This is the fastest way to get answers.
π§ Email Them – Great if you want written instructions.
π₯ Use Online Forms – Some websites have submission forms for questions.
π‘ Questions to Ask:
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What are the requirements to get an assisted living license?
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What types of licenses are available?
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What training or certifications do I need?
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How much are the licensing fees?
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How long does the process take?
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Are there local regulations I should know about?
Step 3: Choose the Right License for Your Facility
Not all assisted living homes are the same! States offer different types of licenses depending on your size and care level. Here are the most common:
π‘ Care Homes – Small homes with 4-6 residents.
π‘ Residential Assisted Living – Medium-sized homes with 6-20 residents.
π’ Big-Box Assisted Living – Large facilities with 20+ residents.
π§ Memory Care Facilities – Homes that specialize in dementia care.
β οΈ Make sure you apply for the right one—choosing the wrong license could delay approval!
Step 4: Prepare & Submit Your Application
Now that you know what’s required, it’s time to get everything in order.
π Complete Required Training – Some states require an administrator’s course.
π Gather Important Documents – Business plan, policies, emergency procedures, and background checks.
π Pass Inspections – Your facility must meet fire, health, and safety standards.
π Pro Tip: Most states have strict checklists—ask for one so you don’t miss anything!
Step 5: Stay Compliant & Keep Your License Active
Once your facility is licensed, you’re not done yet! You’ll need to:
π Renew your license – Most states require annual renewals.
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Stay updated on rules – Regulations can change, so always stay informed.
π Maintain your facility – Keep up with safety inspections and staff training.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
π― Download our Business Plan Checklist to kickstart your journey.
π― Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Got questions? Drop them in the comments below! β¬οΈ
Show full transcript π
Transcript
00:00:00
hey friend I'm Brandon Gustafson I help beginners like you launch their Assisted Living business in the next 12 months excited to have you here with me on the channel today we're going to be talking about how to get a facility license so if you need some help with that make sure you stick around for today's [Music] video hey welcome back again to the channel excited to have you here before we get into our topic today I want to remind you to go grab our free underwriting calculator at Assisted
00:00:28
Living investing. net it's a tool that I created that going to help you determine if you have a profitable investment or not so go grab that free resource Assisted Living investing. net now let's get into the topic for today's video how do you actually get the facility license that you need for your Assisted Living business there's a lot of different options out there's there's a lot of confusion Healthcare can be really confusing there's a lot of rules and regulations there's a lot that goes into
00:00:52
this that you have to kind of understand and if you don't you're going to it's going to feel confusing it's going to feel overwhelming but the more that you gain some knowledge here and get things moving it's going to make it a whole lot easier for you so first let's talk about who you should be contacting at the state and in reality like there's no set person it just kind of depends on the state different departments different people it just kind of depends on who your state has decided is going to be
00:01:21
the person that's in charge of doing licensing for assisted living uh so that's probably not very helpful right but there are a few different places that you can go to start looking number one are the different departments that are within the state some of them that you might want to look at or try to look for as you're trying to get this started are the State Health Department is one of them the Health and Welfare Department the health and human services department or the Department of Public
00:01:47
Health all four of those they kind of it depends on your state may have one of those they may not have them they may have it under a different name those are four different names that I've seen pretty common throughout the nation uh as to who does the licensing for assisted living so you just kind of have to do a little bit of research try to figure that out on your own to see if you can figure out who which of these departments is the one that's going to help you get your facility license for
00:02:14
assisted living and we'll get into those a little bit more when we talk about Medicaid so if you'd like to hear more about Medicaid type in Medicaid down below and we'll have a video that's coming out for you shortly on that we'll make sure that we get that link over to you there as well the other hard part about all of this is not only do you not know exactly where you should be going for licensing you have to figure out how to reach out to them each of these departments they have different ways to
00:02:37
reach out but there's three big ones that I found to to be the main ways for you to reach out and have conversations with people at the health department number one is going to be phone so you just find their phone number on their website you reach out to them and say hey I'm interested in doing an assisted living facility what's the licensing process like or are you the licensing agency are you the the department that does that that or can you point me in the right direction so phone is number
00:03:02
one number two is going to be email they'll typically have some kind of an email that you can reach out and have contact with them there the third one is going to be some kind of a form that they put on their website that says hey if you have if you want some information on this fill out this form will send you the information that you need so phone email and a form that they have on their website those are the three ways that you're going to be able to reach out to them and get more information from them
00:03:24
to see what you need to do to really move things forward now if it were me I really highly suggest that you start off with a phone call phone calls are they're they're just so much easier it's so much easier to get across the point that you need to make things can get lost in translation when you're doing emails I'll do a video at some point on how to do good emails because it's it's actually a lost art I feel like and something that if you can do that well you're going to have a lot more success
00:03:51
but phone calls is is what I really think you should be starting off with reach out and have a conversation now what are you going to say is you know you found them it's the health department you're going to you found their phone number you're getting ready to do a phone call and then you realize crap I don't know I have no idea what questions I need to ask all I know is I want to do an assisted living facility I don't know what to do so let's go over some questions that you can ask as you
00:04:15
are having this conversation with the state with the licensing department at the state and so you can really actually make some real progress towards launching your Assisted Living business so one question that I think you could be asking is you want to number one express your your intent to start an assisted living facility this is the first thing that you do so it would start off with hey my name is Brandon I am looking to start an assisted living facility in you know this city over here um and I would really like some
00:04:44
information on that but I'm trying to figure it out is that something you could help me with okay so that's one of the things that you want to do is ask for some help and some guidance this is number two uh you want to express that intent then you want to say is that something that you can help me with okay people really like to hear this they like to help people in general they really do and so when you are opening up yourself you're being a little bit vulnerable just by using that little bit
00:05:07
of language it's going to cause them to be like oh yeah yeah I can help or if they can't they will say no but you know who can this person over here and they're going to get you to the right person so it's it's kind of a two-pronged effect there number one can you help me you know and and cool you're opening yourself up you're being a little bit vulnerable they're going to come and say yep I can help you out here or number too if they can't they will point you in the right direction and get
00:05:33
you to the right person so if you did your research you found you know I'm going to I'm going to reach out to the health department here and then you reach out and they say no you need to talk to Health and Human Services over here um they're going to give you some contacts there and that's going to just make your process go a lot easier so that's the second thing that I want you to do is ask for some questions ask for some help ask some questions there and be a little bit vulnerable and the third
00:05:56
thing that you're going to want to do here is to make sure that you are talking to to that right person and that's why we phrase that question there are you the right person for me to be talking to like can you help me out with that that's why we want to do this because if you if you don't do that you could get into some big long conversation you could Dive Right into something and asking hey I'm on your website I'm finding this folder over here and I can't seem to find this thing
00:06:21
over there and they're like their whole brain is just like okay I'm overwhelmed I don't know what this guy wants I I've got to figure something out so this is how you're going to do and i' I've said this about three times already hey my name is Brandon I really want to start an assisted living facility I I need some help though I I can't figure this out are you the right person that can help me out with that that's that's all you have to say you say those I don't
00:06:45
know 30 words there it takes you less than 10 15 seconds to say that you are going to get to the right person and they're going to be able to help you out it's really that simple that's all you have to do and then from there now you're hitting the ground running because the rest of this you You' done a bunch of research on you've built your business plan go grab the business plan checklist by the way BP checklist Assisted Living investing. netb checklist for some help on that but
00:07:09
you've built that business plan checklist you are moving things along you know exactly what you need to talk about you know what your passionate about you know what you want to do you just don't know how to do it and so you need to get some help from somebody at the state to help you figure out this process to get the license in place to help you understand exactly what that's going to look like okay so that that is how you start off that conversation and everything from there is just going to
00:07:33
roll and everything's going to go a whole lot more smoothly for you once you get to that point in the process now another thing that I really want to talk to you about here is the type of license that you could be getting so there's the each State's going to have their own little you know interpretation of exactly what this looks like but there are quite a few different types of terms or things that you might be looking at and also I want you to understand when we say assisted living it doesn't
00:07:57
Encompass everybody you might hear somebody say care home or you know the state might call that a group home you have to figure out the vernacular that each state has you can do that by just like looking online and and figuring out some of this stuff U just like you know my State Assisted Living licenses you can kind of figure out a little bit from there and and see see what comes back or when you have this conversation with the person you can just at the state you open yourself up you're starting to get
00:08:23
that information you can really get into okay what are the license types I I just need to understand exactly what this looks like so some of the ones that I I want you to be aware of but please understand as well that this may not be all-encompassing for every single state there's going to be Care Homes there and those are typically like four to six residents something smaller like that there's a residential assisted living facility those can be anywhere from like 12 to 20 Max occupancy and those depends
00:08:48
on the state then there's kind of the the more big box or commercial style assisted living but they don't call it that they're going to call it just an assisted living facility right and so it's something that you want to be aware of but they're not going to call it something weird or or you know the the big box facility license they're not going to call it that they're just going to call it an assisted living facility license beyond that so that's your Assisted Living stuff but then when you
00:09:11
get into some of these other areas there's going to be Memory Care you might if you want to be dealing with Dementia or Alzheimer's some of those types of illnesses that people have um then you want to be going with memory care you could also be looking at like skilled nursing facilities or group homes or Independent Living there's a lot of different options out there in the long-term care space and so what you need to do and and you're doing this in your business plan phase the phase
00:09:36
number one we'll link up a video that talks about phase number one but in there you are figuring out which population that you want to serve and how you're going to serve that and that's going to dictate the type of home that you want to have and ultimately the type of license that you're going to need to operate that home so that's kind of how you want to you start out there this is why everything we do in the business Foundation process is so important because if you get that right
00:10:02
everything else just goes so so much more smoothly so that's why I want you to focus on that here in the beginning also I know there's a lot of you out there that are interested in unlicensed facility and if that's you then type in unlicensed down below i' love to hear from you and and see how many people out there are interested in an unlicensed home the the difference here between an unlicensed and a licensed home you're still going to probably want to reach out to the state and understand exactly
00:10:25
what it is to be an unlicensed facility you don't want to do this in the dark you don't want to do this in your own little Silo and think oh cool I'm unlicensed I'm under the radar nobody's going to know about me what you don't want to do is is do that and then have somebody file a complaint and then somebody comes out and they do some kind of an inspection on your home and they find that you didn't follow all the rules that you needed to be an unlicensed facility and then they shut
00:10:48
you down entirely you don't want to deal with that you're still in the healthcare space you're still working with residents in in the long-term care space you still have to follow certain types of of rules as you get into this so you want to even though you're unlicensed just means you're not filling out the paperwork you're you're still going to have to follow a lot of the different things we'll link up a video actually I have some videos on unlicensed facilities so go ahead and watch those
00:11:12
to help you out but comment unlicensed down below if you'd like me to do a little bit more of a deep dive on in on licensed facilities okay now let's talk a little bit more here about completing the actual application so after you have gone through the process you have figured out exactly you know who licensing agency licensing department is at the state you know what type of license you want to be looking at now you're going to get this this form that's 10 pages long we actually did a
00:11:40
tutorial video in one of the live sessions we will link that up above as well to kind of walk you through exactly how to do that but in as you're going through that process what you're going to find is uh it's 10 pages there's a lot of stuff in there and and you're probably going to need a little bit of guidance there as you're you're getting things along but the application itself is not that that hard and regardless of the type of license that you're going to do it's going to be probably the same
00:12:05
application there's just going to be a few different boxes that you need to check on it it's really that going to be that simple so what you're going to do is you're going to go you're going to find out exactly what that application is you're going to grab it from the from their website you're going to download it often times it's an editable PDF sometimes it's something you got to print off you're going to handr write it regardless it's not that big of a deal
00:12:26
it's 10 pages like it's it's not going to be this huge big long thing but you're going to grab that and you're going to start filling it out now when you start filling this out there's going to be basic information your business name your EIN they're going to want to know about who you are as owners how many owners there are what the ownership percentage is they want to know a lot of these things they are going to want to know the facility information what type of facility are you what type of
00:12:49
Resident are you going to be serving there is's going to be a bunch of questions about that that type of stuff and it's it's going to take you a little bit of time like you could probably knock this out in under two hours hour a half tops honestly it's not going to take you for forever but as a part of that application as a whole there's going to be a lot more information that you need to provide to them so you can actually you know complete the application so the the form itself is
00:13:15
just a tiny part of it you're also going to need to grab Bank information you're going to need to get insurance a certificate of insurance so you need to have that proof of insurance you're going to need to have a business plan this is why we talk about it all the time about business foundations got to build that business plan they more than likely will want to see something along those lines or at least a part of it they're going to want to see that and then probably the most important piece
00:13:38
of this is your policies and procedures so if that's something that you feel like you're going to need help with and guidance on comment policies and procedures down below I would love to to hear about that we'll have a video that comes out on that later but policies and procedures are going to be the most difficult part of this this entire process the application itself not hard you you can definitely do that you can work through all of that now if you this is something you feel like you need some
00:14:00
help with and some guidance I'd love to have you apply for my Mastermind program Alim mastermind.com application it's a simple application process lets me see if I can help you out or not if I can I will send you all the details and you can decide if it's a good fit for you but I would love to see if I can help you out yearlong program I can give you all the details just go to Alim mastermind.com application we can we'll go from there now if you are a person that is buying an existing
00:14:27
facility you you found something you don't want to build from the ground up uh you want to buy an existing business you want to go through that process everything that we just talked about here is actually pretty much the same with slight variation you're going to do what's called a change of ownership process or a chow which is change of ownership um so you know cool acronym because we're in healthcare that's what we do now a chow is basically you're taking everything the exact same you're
00:14:55
just going to take their license you're going to transfer it over to you you get grandfathered in on all of the rules and everything like that we have a video on grandfathering we'll try to link that up above as well and what you're going to find here is you're going to be working a little more directly with the sellers because they have to initiate the process that says yep we're selling the facility so they have to do that then you're going to get that application there's just going to be a box on it
00:15:17
that says change of ownership you're going to check that one we're going to fill that out and then your timing is going to be different as well generally it's going to be a little bit faster actually because they realize that hey this is an existing facility if we drag our feet then we're going to have residents that are out in the out in the streets and we don't want that and so they will generally do a change of ownership a little bit more quickly um but every that you're still dealing with
00:15:44
government everything is relative more quickly for for them could be 6 months because a normal application is N9 months like it just it all just depends and so you you got to kind of figure out exactly what that is but the more consistent you are at communicating with people and and developing those relationships the better off you're going to be all right so to recap this video we've been talking about a lot about how to license your facility number one we're talking about where you
00:16:08
need to go to figure out how to get licensed number two how to talk to them how to find the right person how to talk to them how to have that conversation number three we've been talking about everything that you need to have put together to fill out that application um to make sure things are going we also number four talked about the types of licenses that you might be considering as you're going into that including unlicensed and number five we talked about the change of ownership process we
00:16:31
like just crammed a ton of stuff in here so if you like this video and found this to be helpful just please like the video subscribe and ring the bell as well so you get notified when we put out this other helpful content I go live on Tuesdays and we put out this content on Thursdays as well I love interacting with you and helping you along your journey to help you make some progress and want to remind you to go grab that free underwriting calculator Assisted Living investing. net and it'll pop up
00:16:54
for you and you can just put in your email I'll send it over to you immediately and if you feel like you need some help go apply to the The Mastermind program Alim mastermind.com application I would love to see if I can help you out if I can then cool we can chat about that and bring you into the program so does residential Assisted Living sound interesting to you but you don't know how to get started at Assisted Living investing I'm here to help beginners like you launch their Assisted Living business in the next 12
00:17:19
months and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit keep going step by step by step and I promise you that if you do and you're consistent and persistent you're going to be successful thanks for watching and and have a great day [Music]
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