Guide
What does a CQC rating mean?
What Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement and Inadequate mean, why many private clinics have no rating, and how to use ratings when choosing a clinic.
Last reviewed 23 September 2026. Written by the CQC Clinics team. This is general information, not medical or legal advice.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) assesses health and social care services in England and publishes ratings to show how well they're performing. A rating is CQC's judgement at the time of its assessment. It's a useful starting point, but not the only thing to consider.
The four ratings
- Outstanding: the service is performing exceptionally well.
- Good: the service is performing well and meeting CQC's expectations.
- Requires improvement: the service isn't performing as well as it should, and CQC has told it how it must improve.
- Inadequate: the service is performing badly, and CQC has taken action against the provider.
The five key questions
CQC looks at five key questions for each service, and can rate each one as well as giving an overall rating:
- Safe: are people protected from abuse and avoidable harm?
- Effective: does care achieve good outcomes, based on the best available evidence?
- Caring: do staff treat people with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect?
- Responsive: are services organised to meet people's needs?
- Well-led: does the leadership make sure care is high quality and person-centred?
A service rated Good overall may still have a lower rating for one key question, so it's worth reading the detail on the service's CQC page.
Why many private clinics have no rating
A large share of independent clinics have no published overall rating. Common reasons include:
- the service is newly registered and hasn't been assessed yet
- it's a type of service CQC doesn't always give an overall rating to
- the location provides several kinds of service that are rated separately, so there's no single overall rating
On CQC Clinics, we show "No rating published" or "Not rated" clearly rather than hiding it. It doesn't mean a clinic is unregistered or unsafe. It means there's no overall rating to look at, so other checks matter more.
Carried-over ratings
Sometimes a rating is carried over from a previous registration of the same service, for example when a clinic changes owner or re-registers. We note this on the clinic's page when CQC's data shows it.
How to use ratings
- Check the date. An older rating tells you less about the service today.
- Read the report. The summary tells you what CQC found and what the service needs to improve.
- Check the location. Ratings apply to a specific location, not to every clinic run by the same company.
- Combine it with other checks, such as the professional registration of the people treating you, and clear information about costs and aftercare.
Registered providers must display their most recent CQC rating at their premises and on their website.
Ratings of clinics on CQC Clinics
You can see how ratings break down across the independent clinics we list in our data on private clinics in England.