For skilled nursing facilities, PBJ data is becoming an increasingly prominent lens through which care quality is assessed.
Calling All Nursing Facility Administrators and Directors of Nursing
The Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies is conducting the 2026 Nursing Facility Nurse Staffing Study this spring. The purpose of this survey is to assess nurse staffing issues among nursing facilities throughout the state. Data collected from this survey will help guide stakeholders and legislators in developing policy recommendations and establishing legislative priorities.
— Texas Health and Human Services, February 26, 2026
US News Ratings Show Best Nursing Homes Provide 20% More Staffing Per Resident Day
The best nursing homes on the list provide 20% more total staffing per resident per day compared to the national average, U.S. News found. And top performing short-stay facilities offer 80% more physical therapy per resident per day than the national average. Researchers expanded the number of quality metrics for the ratings from nine to 19 for short-term rehabilitation and from eight to 17 for long-term care.
— Skilled Nursing News, November 12, 2025
Alumni Make Data Shine with Public Health Dashboards
Eric Goldwein, MPH ’19, used AI to help him code the PBJ Dashboard, which tracks staffing trends across 15,000 U.S. nursing homes. “The barrier to entry on creating these data visualizations is lower than ever,” he says. Launched this year, the PBJ Dashboard stitches together nine years of nursing home staffing data from the federal government—payroll-based journal (PBJ) submissions—to provide a wider window for assessing staffing trends over time.
— Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, October 20, 2025
2025–2026 Nursing Home Report Reveals Lower Turnover
Turnover is on the decline across many nursing home departments, according to the newly released 2025–2026 Nursing Home Salary & Benefits Report, published by Hospital & Healthcare Compensation Service (HCS) and supported by AHCA. This year’s results show the most significant turnover drop among Top-Level Executives, falling from 31.97% in 2024 to 22.12% in 2025. CNAs, while still reporting the highest turnover, saw a decrease from 44.16% to 42.34%.
— Provider Magazine, September 17, 2025
Crunching the Nursing Home Data
PBJ is a government dataset logging every nursing home’s staffing for every position, every single day for the last eight, nine years. This is audited, albeit imperfect, data, and the best we have. You can go back to a given date — say, if a resident suffered a fall on May 7, 2021 — and find out how many RN or CNA hours were reported that day. And you can use this data not only to zoom in by the day, but to determine trends over time and tie those to outcomes.
— Aging in America News, September 16, 2025
