A market of buildings, and what that costs a family
The bed count is the honest way to read Santa Monica. 6 communities held 646 of the 696 licensed beds the file recorded in the city, set down as 93 percent, while the 9 houses held 50. The largest single license here was for 174 residents. The median across every Santa Monica record was 6.
Read against the county that is a real difference rather than a rounding one. The file put 9 of the 15 homes here in the six bed band, 60 percent, where the county figure is 83 percent. Santa Monica is one of the places where the small home option families are told to look for is genuinely scarce.
Counting every licensed home rather than the houses alone gives a different list with a different total: 6 in 90403, 5 in 90405 and 4 in 90404, adding to 15. The six bed list adds to 9 instead. The two answer different questions and are worth keeping apart.
The cause is not mysterious, and it is market context rather than anything the licensing file records. A six bed home is a house, so what it costs to run follows what the house costs, and senior living prices across Los Angeles generally track local property costs. That is the pressure a Westside six bed home operates under. The practical consequence for a family is to start early and to ask every home on the list for its own rate and its own availability, because the state register holds neither.
The Westside supply the state files under Los Angeles
This is the single most useful thing to understand about searching the Westside from state records, and almost nobody says it. Community Care Licensing files homes in Mar Vista, Palms, Rancho Park, Westwood and West Los Angeles under a facility city of Los Angeles, not under the neighborhood name. There is no West Los Angeles entry in the file at all.
Taken one ZIP code at a time, the file recorded 10 licensed homes in 90034, which is Palms, 6 in 90066, which is Mar Vista, 7 in 90064, which is West Los Angeles and Rancho Park, and 4 in 90024, which is Westwood. Every one of those is filed under the city name Los Angeles. Culver City, filed under its own name, adds 7 more.
All of that is a short drive from a Santa Monica address outside rush hour, and it is the first place to widen a Westside search into. Price both sides of Centinela before you decide. Neither this page nor the state file carries a rate, so the only way to know what a home charges is to ask it.
The practical version: do not treat the city line as the edge of the market. Treat the drive from whoever will visit most often as the edge of the market. A home in Mar Vista that gets visited four times a week is better than a home in Santa Monica that gets visited once.
Hospital discharges on the Westside
Providence Saint John's Health Center on Santa Monica Boulevard and UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center on 16th Street are both inside the city, and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood is a short drive east. Most Santa Monica placements begin in one of those three.
Both of those in city hospitals sit in ZIP code 90404, and so does a good part of the larger community supply. The file put 4 licensed homes in that ZIP code and only 1 of them is a six bed house. If a discharge planner has given you a date, you can often tour during a hospital visit rather than making a separate trip across town.
The harder conversation is not where but what level. Ask the hospital specifically what your parent will need overnight and how they transfer. Westside families often arrive assuming assisted living will do and discover on the second tour that the honest answer is memory care, or a small home with a caregiver who is awake rather than on call.
How old the Santa Monica licenses are
The oldest first license date anywhere in the Santa Monica records is from 1992 and the newest is from 2024. Of the 15 records, 9 carry a first license date after May 2015 and 8 after May 2020. Both cutoffs are counted back from the file date rather than from today, so they do not drift with the calendar.
That column is not a measure of experience and it is worth being blunt about why. A license belongs to the licensee, not to the address. When a home is sold or the operating entity changes, a new license is issued and the date resets. A building that has taken residents for thirty years can show a date from last year.
Read it as this operator has held this license since, then ask the administrator how long they have actually run the place and what changed when they took it on. How that question gets answered tells you more than the date does.
What this page cannot tell you
A table of licensed homes is a starting point rather than an answer, and it is worth being exact about where it stops.
- Licensed capacity is a ceiling the state set, not an occupancy figure. It does not tell you whether anything is free this month.
- The file carries no rate, so no price on this page is attached to any home in the table and none of them should be read that way.
- Memory care is not a separate California license. A secured dementia setting sits inside one of these same records, so the file cannot show you which homes run one and which do not.
- Nothing here is an inspection result, a complaint history or a quality judgment. We have not visited these homes as an inspector and we do not rate them.
- The overnight question is the one that decides most placements. Who is awake at three in the morning, and how many residents are they responsible for. No public file answers that, and every home will if you ask.
- Then call us. We will tell you which of these have space, which take the level of care your parent needs, and where on the Westside we would look if none of them fits.
Keep reading
- The advisory page: assisted living in Santa Monica and how we help
- Licensed care homes in Los Angeles, the state list
- Assisted living in Culver City and the Westside
- Assisted living in West Los Angeles
- Every city in Los Angeles County, and what the state file listed in each
- Board and care homes and RCFEs explained
- How to check a California RCFE license yourself
- What an RCFE license lets a home do, and where it stops
- 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 Santa Monica?
- The state file dated May 25, 2025 listed 15 residential care facilities for the elderly as licensed in Santa Monica: 6 licensed for 25 residents or more and 9 licensed for six or fewer. All 15 are named on this page with capacity and license number. Check the current state record before relying on any entry.
- Why are there so few board and care homes in Santa Monica?
- The file recorded 9 of the 15 licensed homes here as six bed houses, which it sets down as 60 percent, against 83 percent across Los Angeles County. The reason is housing rather than anything in the licensing record. A six bed home needs a single family house with enough bedrooms, enough bathrooms and enough parking, and senior living prices in Los Angeles generally track local property costs, so a Westside house is a harder place to run one than a San Fernando Valley house is. That is market context. The state file carries no rates and no availability, so ask each home for both.
- Can I tour several communities in one afternoon here?
- Usually yes. The file recorded 6 communities licensed for 25 residents or more in the whole city, and the table on this page prints the street address of every one of them, because an address is published at 25 residents and above. Santa Monica is small enough that an afternoon covers that list rather than a sample of it.
- How much does assisted living in Santa Monica cost?
- A larger community commonly runs about $4,500 to $8,000 a month and a six bed home about $3,500 to $6,000, with secured memory care generally adding $1,000 to $2,000. Senior living prices across Los Angeles generally track local property costs, so a Westside address usually runs above a San Fernando Valley one for the same level of care. Those are ranges for the market rather than prices we set, receive or quote, the state file records no rate at all, and none of these figures is attached to a home in the table.
- Which hospitals discharge into Santa Monica?
- Providence Saint John's Health Center on Santa Monica Boulevard and UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center on 16th Street are both inside the city, and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood is a short drive east. Both of the in city hospitals sit in ZIP code 90404, which is also where the file put 4 of the licensed homes. A family can often see two of them in the gap between a morning round and an afternoon discharge meeting.
- What is not on this list?
- The Westside homes the state files under the city name Los Angeles. There is no West Los Angeles entry in the licensing file at all. The same file recorded 10 licensed homes in ZIP code 90034, which is Palms, and 6 in 90066, which is Mar Vista. Both are minutes from Santa Monica. A search that stops at the city line misses them.
- Are you one of the communities listed here?
- No. Senior Placement Agency LA is a free placement and referral service for families. We do not own, operate, manage or inspect any facility on this page, and a listing is a public record rather than a recommendation, an endorsement or a sign of any relationship. You are welcome to contact any of these homes directly, without us.
- How is this different from your other Santa Monica page?
- This one is the record: what the state had on file for the city on the day it published, in full, with capacity and license numbers. The other one is the advisory page, about how placement works on the Westside, what to ask on a tour and how a family narrows a list down. If you want to know what exists, stay here. If you want to know how to judge it, read that one.