Illinois Skilled Nursing - Market Intelligence

3G Healthcare Real Estate is a sell-side advisory firm working only in skilled nursing facility real estate. This report is the Illinois ownership and operating picture as we track it, drawn from CMS Provider Information, federal ownership filings, county property records, published Medicaid rate files, and our own resolution work.

Every figure below describes the market in aggregate; nothing here is specific to any single owner or property.

Illinois carries a median Medicaid daily rate of $261 across 588 rated facilities, 88 percent of the buildings we track in the state, with the middle half of the market between $239 and $277 a day. The distribution is tight, which usually means a cost-capped methodology holding most buildings in a band. For-profit buildings run $25 a day above non-profit ones ($265 against $240 at the median), a gap that reflects the class each sits in rather than the quality of the building. Rates are effective July 2026.

Illinois skilled nursing is 81 percent for-profit by facility count: 542 of 667 buildings, averaging 2.29 stars overall and 1.72 on staffing. The balance is 108 non-profit, 17 government. Non-Profit buildings rate highest at 3.74 stars and for-profit lowest at 2.29. Ownership type as CMS records it describes the license holder. The real estate behind it is frequently a different party, and that is the layer we resolve.

Illinois averages 2.56 stars overall across 667 facilities and 85,157 licensed beds. Average occupancy runs 74 percent, which is the number that decides whether a building services its debt. Quality splits at the bottom: 353 facilities (53 percent) rate one or two stars overall, 241 of them one star. Special Focus status or candidacy covers 24 of them. CMS fines on the current record total $75.9M across 456 facilities. Total nurse turnover averages 44.4 percent. Counting any facility that carries at least one of a one- or two-star overall rating, Special Focus status or candidacy, CMS fines on the current record, or a distressed-title flag from county records, 493 of 667 buildings show a distress signal, 74 percent of the total.

The eight largest operating groups run 171 of Illinois's 667 skilled nursing facilities, 26 percent of the state and 32 percent of its licensed beds. The remaining 496 buildings are spread across a long tail of smaller operators and independents.

Operating scale is not the same as real-estate ownership, and in most markets the two are separate. The property behind these portfolios is held across a far larger and more fragmented set of owners, many of them holding a single building outright. That is the layer we resolve, and it is why a market that looks consolidated from the operating side is usually anything but from the ownership side.

Illinois's 113 reporting hospitals discharged at least 89,432 traditional-Medicare inpatients in the diagnosis groups that most often need skilled care afterward, in federal fiscal 2024. Sepsis leads at 28,197 discharges. Every one of these patients needed a next setting, and the facilities positioned closest to the highest-volume hospitals see that demand first.

557 of Illinois's 630 graded skilled nursing facilities (88%) are taking a live Medicare payment cut this federal fiscal year under CMS's SNF Value-Based Purchasing program, which blends readmissions, infections, staffing and turnover into one multiplier and applies it to every Medicare day a building bills. The graded set averages a 1.2% cut across the whole state. A federal number like that says little read alone, which is why we check it against the fuller financial and operational record we hold on every building before it reaches a report: the buildings already under pressure elsewhere are the ones a payment cut actually threatens.

Medicare Advantage now covers 43.9% of Illinois's Medicare population, as of April 2026. That is up 3.5 points in three years. Stephenson County runs highest in the state at 61.6%. An MA member typically draws fewer skilled-nursing days per admission than traditional Medicare, so the counties at the top of that list are the ones structurally losing SNF days first, whatever the raw discharge count says.

Beds concentrate where the population does: Cook County with 202 facilities and 33,956 beds, Du Page County with 38 facilities and 5,694 beds, Kane County with 25 facilities and 2,657 beds.

1. CMS Provider Information / Care Compare: facility counts, licensed beds, occupancy, Five-Star ratings, staffing, nurse turnover, fines and Special Focus status, processed 2026-07-01.
2. CMS Payroll-Based Journal: nurse staffing hours and turnover.
3. Federal ownership filings: PECOS Form 855A indirect-owner tree and HCRIS cost-report related parties.
4. County property and mortgage records via the 3G real-estate-ownership resolution layer.
5. 3G Healthcare Real Estate proprietary warehouse, resolved as of the date shown above.
6. Illinois published Medicaid nursing-facility rate files: 588 rated facilities, effective July 2026. A further 6 facilities are excluded from the rate figures: the published file carries conflicting rates against those buildings on the same effective date, so we report no rate rather than pick one.
7. State and federal legislative and regulatory tracking via the 3G intelligence scan, with the source for each item linked in that section.
8. CMS Medicare inpatient claims (fiscal 2024): hospital discharge volumes by diagnosis group, traditional Medicare only; CMS withholds lines under 11 discharges, so volumes are minimums. Readmission rates from CMS Care Compare's three-year measure window.
9. CMS SNF Value-Based Purchasing facility-level file, FY2026 determination (published February 2026): readmission, infection, staffing and turnover measures rolled into one Medicare payment multiplier per facility.
10. CMS Medicare Monthly Enrollment: Medicare Advantage penetration by county, April 2026.