Two ZIP maps, and why this page keeps them apart
Counting every licensed record, the file put 25 in 90501 around Old Torrance, 20 in 90503 on the west side toward Hawthorne Boulevard, 19 in 90505 toward Walteria and the Hollywood Riviera, 17 in 90504 in North Torrance, and 9 in 90502 at the Harbor Gateway end.
Counting only the records licensed for six residents or fewer, the same ZIP codes come out differently: 25 in 90501, 17 in 90503, 14 in 90505, 17 in 90504, and 9 in 90502. The gap between the two lists is where the larger buildings sit.
That distinction sounds pedantic and it is not. A family reading the first list and shopping for a six bed house would be looking in slightly the wrong places. Everywhere on this site, a count of all licensed homes and a count of six bed homes are held as separate figures and never mixed, because mixing them is the single easiest way to publish a sentence that is confidently wrong.
A grid built for six bed licenses
Torrance is a flat residential grid, and the housing stock is low single family houses on regular lots. That is exactly the shape a license for six residents needs: enough bedrooms, a level entrance, a bathroom that can be widened, and a garden. It is not a coincidence that the small home supply here is what it is.
The practical effect is that a move inside Torrance rarely means leaving the neighborhood. Every ZIP code the list above names carried licensed records, so a family already living in one part of the city can usually stay in it. It also means no single drive shows you the market, because the market is 82 houses spread across a lot of different streets.
One detail about the addresses. The state records the city the way the post office writes it, so some records at the Harbor Gateway end carry a Torrance mailing address while sitting on unincorporated county ground rather than inside the city limits. Nothing practical changes for a family, but it explains why a home you find here may not appear on a City of Torrance list.
- Ask how many residents one caregiver covers between midnight and six, and whether that person sleeps on shift.
- Ask whether the home takes a two person transfer, and what happens if your parent later needs one.
- Ask what language the household speaks day to day, and whether the cooking is food your parent would recognize.
- Ask to see the California license posted in the home, and read the inspection history on the state record before signing.
- Veterans and surviving spouses should ask us about VA Aid and Attendance before ruling anything out on price.
Where the beds are, as opposed to where the licenses are
The 8 records licensed for twenty five residents or more held 831 of the 1,322 licensed beds in Torrance. The six bed homes held 491 between them. That put 63 percent of the beds here inside a large building, against 81 percent across Los Angeles County, so the balance in Torrance tips further toward houses than the county's does. The median record here was listed at 6 licensed residents and the biggest at 155.
Those larger buildings are also the ones with the visible history. The oldest first license date in the Torrance file is April 1988 and the most recent is April 2025, and 59 of the 90 records carry a first license date of May 2015 or later. A license belongs to the operator rather than to the building, so a recent date tells you the operator is recent and nothing at all about the age of the property.
Ask an administrator how long the current company has run the community. It is a fair question, families rarely think to ask it, and the answer is not in any public file.
The South Bay reads as one market
The state files Torrance under the area covered by CDSS regional office 11, where the file recorded 460 licensed records across 26 city names. That is a licensing boundary rather than a neighborhood, so it stretches well past anywhere a Torrance family would drive, but the cities immediately around Torrance sit inside it.
In the same file that group held Rancho Palos Verdes with 33, Carson with 28, Harbor City with 15, and Lomita with 13 licensed records. Harbor City and Lomita in particular are worth knowing about: the file recorded 15 of Harbor City's 15 records and 12 of Lomita's 13 at six residents or fewer, and neither city generates enough search traffic for anybody to have built a page about it.
The 905 ZIP area is a quirk worth knowing about too. The file put 90 licensed records in it and filed every one of them under Torrance, the only one of its 119 county city names sitting in that area. A search that starts from the ZIP code therefore stays close to the city line, while a search that starts from a map picks up the 4 South Bay cities named above. Start from the map.
Keep reading
- Assisted living in Torrance, our advice and placement page
- The licensed care home record for the city of Los Angeles
- Licensed care homes in Long Beach, the state record
- 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
- Hospital discharge and senior placement in Los Angeles
Questions families ask us
- How many licensed care homes are there in Torrance?
- The state licensing file dated May 25, 2025 listed 90 residential care facilities for the elderly in Torrance, of which 82 were licensed for six residents or fewer and 8 for twenty five or more. That places Torrance second of the 119 city names the file uses for Los Angeles County, behind Los Angeles with 143 and ahead of Northridge with 74. All 90 are named on this page with licensed capacity and license number.
- Why do other Torrance pages list only a handful of homes?
- Because a directory lists the communities that pay to appear on it, and 82 of the 90 licensed Torrance records are ordinary houses with no marketing budget, no sign, and frequently no website. A page built from advertisers therefore shows the 8 larger buildings and very little else. The table on this page is built from the state file instead, which is why it is longer, duller, and more complete.
- How much does assisted living in Torrance cost?
- A six bed board and care home commonly runs about $3,500 to $6,000 a month and a larger community about $4,500 to $8,000 a month, with a secured memory care setting generally adding $1,000 to $2,000. Senior living prices across Los Angeles generally track local property costs, and the South Bay as a whole sits lower in those ranges than Westside addresses do for the same level of care. What any one home charges is set by an assessment of your parent rather than by its address, so ask each of them. These are typical Los Angeles market ranges rather than prices we set, the state file records no rate at all, and no figure here belongs to any home in the table.
- Where in Torrance are the board and care homes?
- Spread through the whole grid rather than clustered in one corner. Counting only the records licensed for six residents or fewer, the file put 25 in 90501 around Old Torrance, 17 in 90503 on the west side toward Hawthorne Boulevard, 14 in 90505 toward Walteria and the Hollywood Riviera, 17 in 90504 in North Torrance, and 9 in 90502 at the Harbor Gateway end. They are houses on residential streets, so wherever in the South Bay you live the file put homes near you, and none of them are visible from the road.
- Should I look outside Torrance as well?
- Usually yes. The same file recorded Rancho Palos Verdes with 33, Carson with 28, Harbor City with 15, and Lomita with 13 licensed records. Harbor City and Lomita are worth a specific look: the file put 15 of Harbor City's 15 records and 12 of Lomita's 13 at six residents or fewer, and almost nobody writes about either place. Draw a circle around whoever will be visiting rather than searching one city name.
- Which hospitals discharge into Torrance?
- Torrance Memorial Medical Center on Lomita Boulevard and Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance on Torrance Boulevard are both inside the city. Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is just over the line in West Carson and Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center is in Harbor City. Between them they are where most South Bay placements begin. Call us on the day a case manager gives you a discharge date rather than on the day of the discharge.
- Are you one of the homes 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 here is a public record rather than a recommendation or an endorsement. You can contact any of these homes yourself without going through us.