December 3, 2025 – The Long Term Care Community Coalition is deeply disheartened by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ decision to repeal the federal minimum staffing standards for nursing homes. This action removes a long-overdue national floor for staffing – standards that, while modest, provided a basic safeguard to help ensure residents received essential nursing care.
The repealed rule would have required facilities to provide at least 3.48 hours of total nurse staffing per resident per day, including a minimum of 0.55 hours from a registered nurse and 2.45 hours from nurse aides, and it also would have required nursing homes to have a registered nurse onsite 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even these minimums were far below what many residents need, but they represented a clear federal commitment that no nursing home should be allowed to operate beneath a threshold of safety.
Although CMS has eliminated the minimum staffing standards, the rule’s enhanced facility assessment requirements remain in place, continuing the require nursing homes to more rigorously evaluate resident needs and the staffing necessary to meet them. See LTCCC’s fact sheet on providing input on your facility’s staffing assessment.
By rolling these standards back, CMS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are turning away from residents, families, and the dedicated workforce that provides hands-on care every day. Chronic understaffing is not an abstract policy issue – it is a direct driver of avoidable suffering: residents left waiting for help to eat, toilet, bathe, manage pain, or prevent falls and infections. Families already struggling to find safe placements will now face even fewer assurances that their loved ones’ basic needs will be met.
We recognize that nursing homes across the country face real workforce challenges. These challenges are largely driven by the industry’s persistently high turnover rates, which stem from poor working conditions and low wages that push caregivers out of the field. But eliminating minimum standards is not a solution. The answer to staffing shortages is accountability and better jobs, not permitting facilities to admit vulnerable people without the staff required to care for them. As multiple investigations and years of resident and family experiences have shown, treating nursing homes like warehouses for human being leads to harm, indignity, and tragedy.
Residents deserve to live with dignity and safety. Caregivers deserve a system that supports them to do their jobs well. This repeal moves the nation in the opposite direction, and the people who will pay the price are those least able to bear it. We must continue the fight for quality care.