What is a care home catchment area?

It is the practical travel area from which a home will draw residents and regular family visitors, not a wide marketing radius. Because relatives visit often and local authorities place people close to home, care catchments are typically local: a few miles or a 20 to 30 minute drive in most settings, wider and thinner in rural areas.

Should I use a drive-time or a radius for a care catchment?

A radius is quick and easy to defend; a drive-time (isochrone) better reflects how families and staff actually travel where rivers, motorways or poor roads distort a simple circle. Use a drive-time anywhere with real geography, and always apply the same catchment to both demand and competing supply.

How many beds per 100 people aged 85 and over signals undersupply?

England averages about 32.5 registered beds per 100 residents aged 85 and over. A catchment materially below that, roughly 15 percent or more under the national rate, reads as undersupplied, while a similar margin above reads as oversupplied. Always quality-adjust: beds in homes rated Requires improvement or Inadequate may not endure.

How big should a care home catchment be?

Big enough to be statistically meaningful, small enough to reflect real visiting journeys. One to two miles in dense cities, three to five miles or a 20 to 30 minute drive in suburbs and market towns, wider in rural areas. Test one step wider and one step tighter to check the verdict is stable.

Care home catchment analysis: defining and reading a demand area

Threshold Guides · 9 min read · England & Wales

A care home lives or dies on its catchment: the area from which it will actually draw residents and, just as importantly, the families who visit them. Define that area too loosely and a genuine local shortage disappears into borrowed supply; define it too tightly and a handful of homes distort the picture. This guide sets out how to draw a defensible care catchment, count the demand and the competing beds inside it, and read what the result is telling you.

What a care catchment actually is

A catchment is not a marketing circle. For a care home it is the practical travel area within which a resident is likely to be placed and a relative is willing to visit regularly. That makes care catchments tighter than retail or even housing catchments: the deciding factor is not where someone can drive once, but where a daughter or son will drive every week for years. Get the boundary right and every number that follows, demand, supply and the gap, means something. Get it wrong and the appraisal is precise nonsense.

Drive-time or radius: which to use

A radius is the simplest catchment: a circle of, say, three or five miles around the site. It is quick and easy to defend, but it ignores everything that shapes a real journey, including rivers, motorways, a single congested bridge and the plain absence of a road. A drive-time catchment (a 20 or 30 minute isochrone) reflects how families and staff actually travel, and it is usually the better tool anywhere with real geography. As a rule of thumb:

Dense urban: a small radius of one to two miles can already contain thousands of older residents, and a short drive-time is often more honest than a circle that jumps a river.
Suburban and market towns: three to five miles, or a 20 to 30 minute drive-time, is the usual working range.
Rural: the drive-time may be wide but the population thin, so expect a larger area and read the counts with care.

Whichever you choose, use the same catchment for demand and for supply. Counting the over-85 population inside a tight circle but the competing beds inside a wide one is the most common way to manufacture a shortage that is not really there.

Why older people and their families choose locally

The reason care catchments are local is behavioural, not theoretical. Most people enter residential care within their own community, and the pull is strong for good reasons:

Visiting frequency. Closeness to adult children and a spouse is the single biggest driver of home choice for many families. A shorter, easier journey means more visits, and visiting is what relatives optimise for.
Continuity. Staying near an existing GP, hospital, place of worship or community keeps a resident connected, which matters especially in dementia care where familiarity is therapeutic.
Placement patterns. Local authorities generally place funded residents within or close to their own area, so a home draws heavily on the demography immediately around it.

The practical consequence: demand should be measured where these journeys are short, not smeared across a whole county.

Counting the demand inside the catchment

Care demand tracks age. The likelihood of needing residential or nursing care rises steeply into the late eighties, so the workhorse denominator is the population aged 85 and over, with the 75-plus band as a leading indicator of the pipeline behind it. Using ONS small-area population estimates, you sum the over-85 residents of every small area whose centroid falls inside your catchment. Then look forward: the ONS 2022-based projections grow that figure to 2043, and nationally the 85-plus population is expected to rise by around 65 percent (roughly 1.47 million to about 2.42 million). A catchment that looks marginal today can be comfortably viable across a scheme's operating life once that growth is layered in.

Counting the competing beds, and their quality

Supply comes from the CQC HSCA Active Locations register, which lists every registered care home, its number of beds, whether it is registered for nursing as well as personal care, whether it provides dementia care, its provider, and its latest inspection rating. Inside your catchment you total the beds, but a raw total hides two things worth surfacing:

Registration mix. A catchment can look well supplied on beds yet be short of the specific provision you plan, for example dementia-registered or nursing beds. Split the count by type before you conclude anything.
Quality, and durability. Ratings run Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement and Inadequate. Beds in homes rated Requires improvement or Inadequate are at-risk supply: they may shrink, close or lose registration, which quietly turns a balanced market into an undersupplied one. Treat them as latent demand a new, well-run scheme can plan around.

How catchment size changes the read

The headline metric is beds per 100 residents aged 85 and over, set against the England average of about 32.5. The trap is that this ratio is highly sensitive to how wide you drew the boundary:

Draw it too wide and you pull distant homes into the supply count, diluting a real local gap until the site looks adequately served.
Draw it too tight and small counts swing the ratio wildly, so one large competitor makes the area look oversupplied and one closure makes it look starved.

The discipline is to fix a defensible catchment first, on travel logic rather than on the answer you want, apply it identically to demand and supply, and then test one step wider and one step tighter to see how stable the verdict is. A conclusion that survives that sensitivity check is one you can put in front of a lender or a planning officer.

An illustration. Suppose a five-mile catchment around a market-town site holds about 4,000 residents aged 85 and over and roughly 1,150 registered beds across the competing homes. That is close to 29 beds per 100 aged 85-plus, meaningfully below the national 32.5, so the area reads as undersupplied, a gap of a couple of hundred beds at the national rate. Layer on projected over-85 growth to 2043 and the gap widens further. The numbers here are illustrative, but the method is exactly what an appraisal should show.

Running it in practice

You can assemble all of this by hand from open data, but it is slow, and land moves faster than a spreadsheet. In Threshold Care you drop a pin on the site, set the catchment as a radius or a drive-time, and the over-85 demand, every competing home with its beds and CQC rating, and the beds-per-100 gap appear in under 60 seconds. To understand the wider market a site sits in, browse the demand and supply picture for every English local authority, then read the site itself against it. From there the natural next questions are whether the wider area is genuinely short (see where care beds are undersupplied in England) and who the residents would be, self-funders or local-authority placements, which shapes the fees the catchment will bear (see self-funders vs local-authority care demand).

Frequently asked questions

What is a care home catchment area?: It is the practical travel area from which a home will draw residents and regular family visitors, not a wide marketing radius. Because relatives visit often and local authorities place people close to home, care catchments are typically local: a few miles or a 20 to 30 minute drive in most settings, wider and thinner in rural areas.
Should I use a drive-time or a radius for a care catchment?: A radius is quick and easy to defend; a drive-time (isochrone) better reflects how families and staff actually travel where rivers, motorways or poor roads distort a simple circle. Use a drive-time anywhere with real geography, and always apply the same catchment to both demand and competing supply.
How many beds per 100 people aged 85 and over signals undersupply?: England averages about 32.5 registered beds per 100 residents aged 85 and over. A catchment materially below that, roughly 15 percent or more under the national rate, reads as undersupplied, while a similar margin above reads as oversupplied. Always quality-adjust: beds in homes rated Requires improvement or Inadequate may not endure.
How big should a care home catchment be?: Big enough to be statistically meaningful, small enough to reflect real visiting journeys. One to two miles in dense cities, three to five miles or a 20 to 30 minute drive in suburbs and market towns, wider in rural areas. Test one step wider and one step tighter to check the verdict is stable.

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Care figures are statistical estimates from official open data (CQC HSCA Active Locations, ONS population and 2022-based subnational projections) under the Open Government Licence. England coverage. Not investment or valuation advice.