The city where the large buildings win
14 of Pasadena's 32 licensed facilities were licensed for 25 residents or more, and the largest single license in the city was for 340 beds. Count beds rather than licenses and the picture goes further: those communities held 95 percent of the 2,278 beds the file recorded here, while the six bed houses held 102 and the middle band held 9.
So Pasadena reads as a large community market on almost every measure. The one exception is the plain count of licenses, where the houses still edge ahead 17 to 14, and where the median capacity across every Pasadena record was 6. Both of those things are true at the same time, which is why the city confuses families who read only one statistic about it.
For a family this is good news with a catch. The good news is real choice in apartment style assisted living inside one drive, close enough together that you can tour three in a morning and compare them properly rather than from memory. The catch is that if what you actually want is a quiet house with six residents in it, the practical search usually runs past the city line and into the foothill towns.
Two Pasadenas, and the houses are in neither of them
The large communities sit in two clusters. One is south and east of the Playhouse District, around East Villa Street, South El Molino Avenue, Oak Knoll and East Del Mar, close enough to Lake Avenue to walk to lunch. The other runs north up Fair Oaks and Garfield above the 210. Those are two different parts of Pasadena to tour, a brochure will not tell you which one you are looking at, and it is worth seeing both.
The six bed houses are somewhere else again, on ordinary residential streets, which is the entire point of a six bed house. It also means a visiting daughter parks on a residential block rather than in a visitor lot, and that a home on the same street as your parent's own house can be invisible from the road.
- All 32 licensed homes by ZIP code: 11 in 91104, 8 in 91107, 4 in 91101, 4 in 91106, 3 in 91103 and 2 in 91105.
- The 17 six bed houses alone, a separate population with its own total: 7 in 91104, 5 in 91107, 2 in 91106, 1 in 91101, 1 in 91103 and 1 in 91105.
- Where those houses sit: 7 of them in 91104, north and east of Washington Boulevard, and 5 of them in 91107, out toward Hastings Ranch and the Sierra Madre line. Those counts come from the six bed list rather than the all records list.
- Keep those two lists apart when you use them. Conflating a count of all licensed homes with a count of the six bed subset is the easiest mistake to make with this data, and it changes the answer completely.
A recent license date on an old building
The file shows 8 of Pasadena's 32 licenses first issued in the five years before it was published, and 15 within ten years. That is not a wave of new construction. A license can be reissued on a building that has stood for decades, and in this city it regularly is.
A license attaches to the licensee rather than to the building. When a community is sold or the operating entity changes, a new license is issued and the first licensed date starts again. The oldest date anywhere in the Pasadena records is from 1987, and the newest is from 2024.
It is still worth reading, just not as tenure. A license issued last year means the people running that community today are new to running that community. How an administrator answers a direct question about that tells you something a licensing file never will, and it is a fair question to ask on a tour.
Senior living, assisted living, board and care: one license
Senior living is the wider word, and it takes in independent living, which is housing rather than licensed care. Every home in the table on this page was listed as licensed care. If a Pasadena building calls itself senior living and does not appear here, it is very likely independent living, and the practical difference is whether anyone on site is licensed to help your mother shower.
Board and care is the third word families use, and in California it is the same license again, just at six residents or fewer. That is why a 340 bed community and a house on a quiet street north of Washington sit in the same table. What separates them is scale, and scale is the single biggest thing to get right: a small staff looking after six people is a different daily experience from a large building with a staffing rota.
Huntington Hospital on West California Boulevard is the acute hospital closest to most of Pasadena, and Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia covers the east end of the foothill line. A hospital discharge is the most common way a search like this one starts. If a case manager has already named a discharge date, bring it to us that day. The stretch before a discharge is the only part of this timeline you get to use well.
When the search reaches past the city line
The 911 ZIP code area held 1 city name in this file and it is Pasadena, so there is no neighboring ZIP area total to quote here. The foothill towns families actually consider are Altadena directly north above the 210, Arcadia and Sierra Madre east along the foothill line, South Pasadena south, and La Canada Flintridge northwest. Most of that is a short drive from Old Pasadena, which for a daughter visiting after work is the number that matters rather than the city line.
In the state's own wider grouping, the area covered by CDSS regional office 28, the file recorded 350 licensed homes across 37 places. It reaches a long way east and south, well past the foothills: the largest of the others in it were Claremont at 31, Glendora at 22 and Cerritos at 21, 74 between them. Useful to know it exists, and for most Pasadena families much too far for a Sunday visit.
That is the honest version. The immediate towns are close and the licensing grouping is wide, and neither of those facts is a substitute for asking who is actually going to make the drive and how often. We start there, then work outward only as far as we have to.
Keep reading
- The advisory page: assisted living in Pasadena and how we help
- Licensed care homes in Glendale, the state list
- Licensed care homes in Burbank, the state list
- How to check a California RCFE license yourself
- What an RCFE license lets a home do, and where it stops
- Every city in Los Angeles County, and what the state file listed in each
- Board and care homes and RCFEs explained
- Board and care vs assisted living in Los Angeles
- Senior living costs in Los Angeles and ways to pay
- Memory care and dementia placement in Los Angeles
Questions families ask us
- How many assisted living facilities are there in Pasadena?
- The state file dated May 25, 2025 listed 32 residential care facilities for the elderly as licensed in Pasadena: 17 licensed for six residents or fewer, 1 in the middle band of seven to 24, and 14 licensed for 25 or more. All 32 are named in the table on this page.
- Why is it easier to find a big community than a small home in Pasadena?
- Because that is what the file shows. Countywide, 83 percent of licensed homes were six bed houses. In Pasadena it was 53 percent. By beds the difference is starker still: the 14 larger communities held 95 percent of the 2,278 licensed beds in the city, and the houses held 102. Apartment style assisted living is genuinely easy to compare here. A quiet six bed house takes longer to find.
- Which Pasadena ZIP codes have licensed care homes?
- Across all 32 records the file listed 11 in 91104, 8 in 91107, 4 in 91101, 4 in 91106, 3 in 91103 and 2 in 91105. Narrowed to the six bed houses alone, which is a different population and a different total of 17, the file put 7 in 91104 and 5 in 91107.
- What does assisted living in Pasadena cost?
- A larger community commonly runs about $4,500 to $8,000 a month, normally base rent plus a care level fee set by an assessment, and a board and care home about $3,500 to $6,000 a month as one all in rate. Both figures are typical ranges for the Los Angeles market. We do not set them or quote them, and neither is attached to a home in the table. Ask what the assessment scored her at and what would move her up a tier.
- Why do several long standing Pasadena communities show recent license dates?
- A license attaches to the licensee rather than to the building. Sell a community, or change the operating entity behind it, and a fresh license is issued with a fresh date. The file shows 8 of the 32 Pasadena licenses first issued in the five years before it was published and 15 in the ten years before it, while the oldest date in the city's records is from 1987. Read the column as this operator has held this license since, never as this building opened then.
- Is memory care listed separately?
- No. California does not issue a separate memory care license. A secured dementia setting sits inside one of these same residential care facility licenses, so the state file cannot tell you which Pasadena communities run one. It can only tell you which are large enough to have the space for it. Which ones actually do, and which will decline a resident with a behavioral history, is set by the operator and appears in no public file.
- How current is this list?
- It reflects the state file of May 25, 2025 and nothing that has happened since it. Homes shut, change hands and have their licensed capacity revised. Check the current status of any home with the California Department of Social Services before you rely on it. The license number in each row is what you need in order to do that.
- Do you have any relationship with these communities?
- Senior Placement Agency LA is a free placement and referral service for families. We do not own, operate, manage or inspect a single facility named here. Each row is a public record of what the state had on file and not a recommendation from us, and you are welcome to approach any of these communities directly.