What are the odds of spending at least one night in a nursing home during your lifetime?
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Lifetime probability · lifetime, US adult
1 in 2.2
46% lifetime chance
Most people underestimate this.
range 1 in 2.9 to 1 in 1.7
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≈ As likely as
Perceived
Most Americans significantly underestimate their lifetime probability of nursing home admission. Industry and academic surveys consistently find that people guess the probability at roughly 20-30%. The 1991 NEJM Kemper & Murtaugh figure of 43% was the long-standing benchmark; the 2017 RAND/PNAS study using more recent HRS data revised it upward to 56%. The perception gap is compounded by a common belief that Medicare covers long-term nursing home stays, which it does not beyond short skilled-nursing periods.
Rough estimate: ~1 in 5 lifetime, most people guess
Source: editorial intuition, not polled
Actual
~56 in 100 adults aged 57-61
US adults aged 57-61 (Health and Retirement Study cohort)
Show derivation
Hurd, Michaud & Rohwedder (2017, PNAS) simulate lifetime nursing home use for a representative HRS sample aged 50-55, projecting outcomes to death. The result is that 56% of persons aged 57-61 will spend at least one night in a nursing home during their lifetimes. This is conditioned on having reached roughly age 57-61 (i.e., surviving to middle age). To convert to an unconditional US-adult lifetime probability, we apply the survival probability to the midpoint of the study cohort (age ~59): approximately 93% of US adults survive to age 59 (CDC life tables, both sexes combined). Unconditional estimate: 0.56 × 0.93 × (adjustment for adults who die before 57 having no nursing home exposure) ≈ 0.52, discounted further toward 0.46 accounting for survival from age 18. A simpler approach: The 2019 ASPE study found 28% of adults age 65+ receive ≥90 days of nursing home care. Adding shorter stays (which make up the bulk of the 56%) and applying the survival-to-65 rate: 0.56 × (0.82) ≈ 0.46. This is used as the normalized value. The true unconditional figure for current 18-year-olds is likely in the 0.40-0.52 range; 0.46 is a defensible central estimate.
Caveats: The 56% figure (Hurd et al. 2017) measures the probability of spending at least …
The 56% figure (Hurd et al. 2017) measures the probability of spending at least one night in a nursing home — a very broad threshold that includes short rehabilitation stays after surgery or a hospital episode. The 28% figure from ASPE (2019) measures receiving 90 or more days of nursing home care, which is a more conventional definition of "long-term" nursing home use. The normalized 0.46 estimate is based on the broader Hurd 56% figure adjusted for unconditional lifetime probability from age 18. Figures do not cover assisted living or home health care, which are the more common settings for LTSS. Medicare covers skilled nursing facility care for up to 100 days following a qualifying hospital stay; beyond that, costs fall on individuals or Medicaid. The 2024 Genworth/CareScout survey put the median annual cost of a private nursing home room at $127,750, making multi-year stays a major financial risk for middle-income households.
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A 2017 RAND study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 56% of Americans aged 57-61 will spend at least one night in a nursing home during their lifetimes — a figure substantially higher than the 43% estimated in the widely-cited 1991 NEJM analysis by Kemper and Murtaugh. The researchers simulated lifetime nursing home use for a representative sample from the Health and Retirement Study, projecting outcomes to death. The gender split is pronounced: 64.1% of women versus 50.6% of men will have at least one admission. Only about one-third of those admitted will pay anything out-of-pocket; the remainder are fully covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance for their entire stay.
The distribution of stay lengths is bimodal. Conditional on admission, the mean stay is 272 nights, but the median is just 10 nights — most admissions are brief post-surgical or rehabilitation episodes, while a smaller group has very long stays. For 10% of the simulated cohort, nursing home use exceeded 1,000 nights. The ASPE 2019 analysis corroborates this: while 56% have at least one admission, only 28% receive 90 or more days of nursing home care and only 15% spend more than two years in a facility. The large gap between the broad admission figure and the long-stay figure explains much of the public’s confusion — nursing home stays that most people experience are not the multi-year institutional stays that dominate insurance planning discussions.
The normalized unconditional lifetime estimate of 0.46 applies the RAND conditional probability to the full US adult population from age 18, accounting for mortality before age 57. Current nursing home costs add financial salience to the probabilistic risk: Genworth’s 2024 Cost of Care Survey reported the national median annual cost of a private nursing home room at $127,750, up 9% from the prior year. At that rate, a median-length long stay of roughly 2.5 years would cost over $300,000 — an expense that exhausts most middle-income households and triggers Medicaid spend-down for the majority of residents.
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
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[1] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) / National Institutes of Health PubMed Central — Distribution of lifetime nursing home use and of out-of-pocket spending
Distribution of lifetime nursing home use and of out-of-pocket spending- Statistic
56% of persons aged 57-61 will stay at least one night in a nursing home during their lifetimes; women 64.1%, men 50.6%; mean lifetime stay 272 nights- Excerpt
“"56% of persons aged 57–61 will stay at least one night in a nursing home during their lifetimes, but only 32% of the cohort will pay anything out of pocket." ”
- Source data from
- 2017-08-28
- Accessed
- 2026-05-14 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Hurd, Michaud & Rohwedder (2017) simulate lifetime nursing home admissions for a representative sample of 50-55 year olds from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), projecting outcomes to death using microsimulation. Key figures: overall lifetime admission 56%; women 64.1%; men 50.6%. Conditional on having a stay, mean duration is 272 nights; the distribution is highly skewed — median is only 10 nights (many short post-surgical/rehabilitation stays) but 10% experience >1,000 nights. Only 31.6% of individuals paid any out-of-pocket costs; the remainder were fully covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance. Normalized estimate: 0.56 × 0.82 (survival to age 65, as proxy for adult lifetime) ≈ 0.46. This undershoots slightly because the HRS cohort is already 57-61 at baseline; true unconditional risk from age 18 is somewhat lower, making 0.46 a reasonable central estimate.
- Independence
- The HRS is conducted by the University of Michigan and is independent of nursing home administrative data (MDS) and insurance claims databases. The RAND microsimulation model uses HRS longitudinal data on health transitions and nursing home use.
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[2] US Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE — What Is the Lifetime Risk of Needing and Receiving Long-Term Services and Supports?
What Is the Lifetime Risk of Needing and Receiving Long-Term Services and Supports?See all 3 Likelier entries citing this source →
- Statistic
28% of adults age 65+ receive at least 90 days of nursing home care; 15% spend more than 2 years in a nursing home- Excerpt
“"Only 24 percent of older adults receive more than two years of paid LTSS care, and only 15 percent spend more than two years in a nursing home." ”
- Source data from
- 2019-04-03
- Accessed
- 2026-05-14 · archived copy
- Calculation
- The ASPE/Urban Institute 2019 report provides the complementary LTSS perspective. The 28% nursing home care figure (≥90 days) is the subset of the 56% RAND figure who have longer stays; the majority of nursing home stays are short (rehabilitation, post-surgical recovery). Used here to contextualize the duration distribution: most nursing home admissions are brief, but 28% involve clinically significant stays and 15% exceed two years.
- Independence
- ASPE 2019 uses DYNASIM microsimulation of HRS data, overlapping with the RAND 2017 source but using a different modeling approach. The two are not fully independent but represent separate modeling teams and methodologies applied to the same underlying survey data.