What AHCA cites small Florida ALFs for
Surveys from July 2023 to July 2026
We read every citation AHCA wrote at the 1,171 assisted living facilities in Florida licensed for 16 beds or fewer. Over three years of surveys, 874 of those homes were cited at least once. Between them they took 5,659 citations. This page is the count, tag by tag, and the method is at the bottom so you can check our work.
The 25 tags cited most
Small ALFs, July 2023 to July 2026
A tag is AHCA’s code for the rule a citation falls under, and it’s printed beside every deficiency on the survey report. These 25 account for 4,156 of the 5,659 citations. Most are about what’s in a file or on a shelf. That’s why the same ones turn up at home after home. The first ten have a page each, listing the paper the rule asks for, and the documents page has all of it in one list.
| Tag | Topic | Times cited | Homes hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| A0162 | Resident records | 384 | 337 |
| A0078 | Staff files | 349 | 312 |
| A0152 | Physical plant | 273 | 249 |
| A0160 | Facility records | 246 | 222 |
| A0081 | Staff training | 210 | 191 |
| A0052 | Medication self-admin | 210 | 200 |
| A0054 | Medication records (MAR) | 196 | 182 |
| A0030 | Resident rights | 194 | 177 |
| A0055 | Medication storage | 194 | 175 |
| A0200 | Emergency power | 177 | 163 |
| A0032 | Elopement standards | 158 | 147 |
| A0093 | Food and diet | 158 | 148 |
| A0084 | Medication training | 155 | 147 |
| A0025 | Supervision | 150 | 135 |
| A0010 | Continued residency | 130 | 116 |
| A0079 | Staffing levels | 124 | 121 |
| A0161 | Staff records | 124 | 116 |
| A0083 | First aid and CPR | 118 | 112 |
| A0182 | Emergency plan | 95 | 89 |
| A0056 | Medication labels and orders | 94 | 90 |
| CZ814 | Background screening | 93 | 92 |
| A0077 | Administrator | 88 | 84 |
| A0167 | Resident contracts | 82 | 78 |
| A0033 | Physical restraints | 79 | 78 |
| A0031 | Third-party services | 75 | 72 |
How serious they were
Every citation carries a class, and the class sets the fine. Section 429.19 of Florida’s statutes puts a class 1 citation at $5,000 to $10,000 and a class 4 at $100 to $200, with 2 and 3 in between.
| Class | Fine for each | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class 1 | $5,000 to $10,000 | 29 | 1% |
| Class 2 | $1,000 to $5,000 | 178 | 3% |
| Class 3 | $500 to $1,000 | 4,920 | 87% |
| Class 4 | $100 to $200 | 71 | 1% |
| No class recorded | 461 | 8% |
Class 3 was 87% of the total. Classes 1 and 2, the ones that put a license at risk, were 207 citations between them, and they’re a different kind of problem. The tags behind them are mostly about supervising residents and respecting their rights, with A0025 and A0030 cited most in class 1 and again in class 2. That’s staffing on the day, not paper in a file. We won’t pretend software fixes it.
Found on routine visits
Of these citations, 78% came out of a standard survey, the routine visit every licensed home gets. Only 14% came out of a complaint inspection, against 26% for ALFs of every size. So a small home’s citations mostly turn up on a visit that was coming anyway.
By size of home
Size doesn’t change the picture much. Homes of 6 beds or fewer, which are three in four of the list, were the likeliest to be cited at all. Once they were cited, homes of 11 to 16 beds took the most citations each.
| Beds | Homes | Cited at least once | Citations per cited home |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 6 | 873 | 670 (77%) | 6.4 |
| 7 to 10 | 125 | 83 (66%) | 5.8 |
| 11 to 16 | 173 | 121 (70%) | 7.3 |
Half the homes that were cited took 5 citations or fewer, and 30 took 20 or more.
How we counted
The source is AHCA’s public inspection records, pulled from its document system one cited deficiency at a time, for the assisted living facilities on the state’s facility map. That is 37,263 citations at 3,090 facilities, going back to 2008. Everything above uses surveys on or after 1 July 2023. The latest in the data is dated 21 July 2026.
A small ALF here is one licensed for 16 beds or fewer and still operating in July 2026, which comes to 1,171 homes. Of those, 290 were surveyed in those three years and never cited, and 7 had no survey in the window at all, most likely because their license is new.
The tags are AHCA’s own, from its March 2022 list of survey tags, and the short topic names are ours. About 8% of citations carry no class in the record, and they’re counted under “No class recorded”.
We don’t publish a count for any single home, or for any group small enough to point at one. Anybody can look a home up on AHCA’s own site, and we’d rather not be the page that does it for them.
Alfie isn’t affiliated with the Agency for Health Care Administration. We sell software to the homes these numbers describe, so read them knowing that. The data was last rebuilt on 31 July 2026.