Records desk / St. Louis metropolitan area
What the public record actually shows about care at home in the St. Louis metro
Six government files cover this subject. Between them they name every Medicare-certified home health agency in the metro, score most of them, map which zip codes each one serves, and count federal identifiers by city. Not one of them contains a single provider of non-medical care at home, which is the kind of help most families are actually shopping for. This desk publishes what the files say, states plainly where they go silent, and shows you how to run the lookups yourself.
The inventory: what is on file
This site holds six sources and no opinions. Every number on every page is copied from one of them on the pull date shown in the left margin, and every page carries a link back to the file it came from so you can check the figure against the original rather than take this desk's word for it.
From the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services there are three files. The provider file lists Medicare-certified home health agencies with an address, a CMS certification number, an ownership type and a certification date. Filtered to agencies with a street address inside the fifteen counties of the St. Louis Missouri and Illinois metropolitan statistical area, it returns 50 agencies, of which 47 carry a numeric quality of patient care star rating and three do not. The patient survey file adds a separate summary star drawn from interviews with patients after care, and it joins to 38 of those 47 agencies on the certification number. The service area file records which zip codes each certified agency reports serving, and in this metro it holds 3,563 rows across 262 zip codes.
From the states there are two. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services publishes a directory of in-state certified home health providers, updated 2026-09-04, in which 39 agencies list at least one St. Louis metro Missouri county as a service area, each with a licence number and an expiry date. The Illinois Department of Public Health publishes a home services agency directory of 1,029 rows covering the Illinois side. The Illinois file is on this desk but is not yet published as a page here, for a reason given in the sources list and repeated below.
From the federal provider registry there is one. The National Plan and Provider Enumeration System records organisations that have requested a national provider identifier under the taxonomy code 253Z00000X, which the federal taxonomy calls In Home Supportive Care. Queried across every metro zip code and deduplicated, it returns 1,162 organisational registrations in 65 cities. Read the warning that goes with that number before you read anything else into it.
How this desk draws the metro line
Six files, six different ideas of what a place is. The CMS provider file records a street address. The service area file records zip codes. The Missouri directory records counties. The federal identifier registry records whatever a registrant typed. Comparing counts across them is only meaningful if the boundary is the same one every time, so this desk fixes it once and applies it everywhere.
The area is the St. Louis Missouri and Illinois metropolitan statistical area as delineated by the federal government: fifteen counties, being the city of St. Louis and St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and Warren counties in Missouri, and Madison, St. Clair, Monroe, Clinton, Bond, Macoupin, Calhoun and Jersey counties in Illinois. Zip codes are mapped to those counties with the Census Bureau's 2020 relationship file, which reports the land area each zip code shares with each county, and a zip code is treated as in the metro if any part of it falls inside one of the fifteen. Where a page needs to name one county for a zip code that straddles two, it names the county holding the largest share of that zip code's land.
Two consequences are worth stating because they change the numbers. Counting agencies by street address is not the same as counting agencies that serve the metro: 50 certified agencies are headquartered inside the boundary, while 81 distinct certification numbers appear in the service area file for at least one metro zip code, because agencies based in Springfield or Columbia or across the river report serving territory here. And a count filtered to the fifteen counties will differ from any count someone else publishes using a looser or tighter St. Louis. Neither is wrong. They are answers to different questions, which is exactly why the boundary is written down.
The distinction that decides everything else
Almost every mistake a family makes when comparing quotes for help at home comes from one place. Two different services share a similar name, and only one of them is licensed in Missouri.
Home health is skilled clinical care delivered at home: nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, medical social work. In Missouri it requires a state licence, and when it is billed to Medicare it also requires federal certification and a CMS certification number. That is the category every star rating, every certification number and every state licence number on this site belongs to.
Non-medical care at home is the other thing. Personal care, bathing and dressing assistance, companionship, homemaking, meal preparation, transportation, supervision and support for a person living with dementia. Missouri does not license this category, does not certify it, does not inspect it and publishes no directory of the providers who do it. That is not a claim this desk is making about quality. It is a statement about which files exist.
The practical consequence is sharp. If you ask a provider of non-medical care at home for its state licence number and it tells you it does not have one, that answer may be completely correct. If a provider of the same service shows you a Missouri home health licence number, it is telling you it also operates a certified home health agency, which is a different and larger thing, and you should ask which entity the licence belongs to and which one is quoting you. And if you compare a Medicare star rating against a company that provides only non-medical care at home, you are comparing a score to the absence of a score, not to a lower one.
This is the single most useful thing on this desk, so it has its own file: home health and home care in Missouri are two different categories, with the definitions and the licensing statutes cited to their sources on both sides of the river.
What these files cannot tell you
A records desk is only honest if it is as clear about the gaps as about the contents, so here are the gaps, stated plainly.
The files cannot tell you whether an agency is any good with your particular relative. A CMS star rating is a summary of quality measures across a whole agency's Medicare patient population over a reporting period. It is a real, audited, useful number, and it is still an average of other people's outcomes. It is not a prediction about one household.
They cannot tell you what care costs. No file on this desk contains a rate, an hourly price or a quoted total, and this site publishes none, because no public source carries them for this metro.
They cannot tell you who will actually turn up. Nothing in any of these records describes the individual caregiver, their training, their supervision or how the agency staffs a shift when someone calls in sick. Those are questions for the provider, and they are usually more predictive of how the arrangement goes than anything published here.
They cannot tell you that a provider not in a file is worse than one that is. Absence from the certified home health directory means the provider is not a certified home health agency. For a company that provides non-medical care at home, that is the expected and correct result.
And the federal identifier file, the one with the largest number on this page, tells you the least of all. A national provider identifier is issued on request. Applying for one involves no inspection, no proof of competence, no bond, no insurance check and no state approval, and nothing removes it when an organisation stops operating. The count of 253Z00000X registrations in a city is a count of paperwork, not of businesses, not of quality, and not of anything a family should weigh. It is published here because it is the only public measure of how crowded this unlicensed category is, and because leaving it out would be its own kind of dishonesty.
The files on this desk
One further file is prepared and deliberately unpublished. A table of the currently unexpired licensed home services agencies on the Illinois side of the metro is built and sitting on this desk. It is not linked above and it is not in the sitemap, because the Illinois portal record for that dataset carries no machine readable licence statement and this desk will not republish a state file at row level until someone has read the portal's terms and confirmed it. That is a deliberate hold, not an oversight, and it is recorded in the sources list.
New Plan Care
New Plan Care is a client of this site's publisher, OwnersFirm, and pays for this box. It is here because it is the kind of provider this desk writes about, not because any record ranked it. No government body scored it, and no table on this site contains it.
To be exact about what it is: New Plan Care provides non-medical care at home in the St. Louis metro, meaning personal care, companionship, homemaking, transportation, and support for people living with dementia. It is an independent Missouri limited liability company. It is not a Medicare-certified home health agency, and it does not appear in the Missouri certified home health directory. That absence is not a mark against it. Missouri does not license or certify this category of care at all, which is the whole subject of the two-categories file.
Call New Plan Care at (314) 405-0887.
Running the check yourself
Everything on this site can be reproduced by anyone with a browser, and the point of the desk is that you should not have to trust it. Five lookups cover almost every question a family has about whether a provider is what it says it is.
Search the provider's exact legal name in the federal identifier registry to see what taxonomy it enumerated under and where. Search the Missouri certified home health directory to see whether it holds a state home health licence, remembering that for a non-medical provider the correct answer is that it does not appear. Search the Illinois directory if the care is on that side of the river. Search the Missouri Secretary of State business registry to confirm the legal entity exists, is in good standing, and is the same entity named on the contract you are being asked to sign. And if the provider is a certified home health agency, look it up in the CMS comparison tool to see the same star ratings this desk republishes, straight from the source.
Each of those five, with what it can answer and what it cannot, is set out step by step in the walkthrough. It is the most useful page here for a family in the middle of a decision, and it is the page this desk would rather you read than any table.
Ask the desk to have New Plan Care call you
This form goes to New Plan Care, the one disclosed paid placement on this site. It does not go to any agency named in a table here, and this desk does not pass your details to anyone else. Give the minimum needed for a call back. Do not send us a diagnosis, a medication list or any medical detail: there is no field for it, and this site does not collect it.
Sources on this page
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Agencies 6jpm-sxkc, file HH_Provider_Jul2026.csv. Pulled 2026-09-10.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Patient Survey (HHCAHPS) ccn4-8vby, file HHCAHPS_Provider_Jul2026.csv. Pulled 2026-09-10.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Zip Codes m5eg-upu5, file HH_Zip_Jul2026.csv. Pulled 2026-09-10.
- Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Home Health In-State Certified Providers 3dcz-79am. Portal record updated 2026-09-04. Pulled 2026-09-10.
- Illinois Department of Public Health, Home Services Agency Directory 9miz-pbzm, 1,029 rows. Metadata read 2026-09-10. Row-level republication held.
- National Plan and Provider Enumeration System, NPI Registry public API, organisational records under taxonomy 253Z00000X. Pulled 2026-09-10.
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file, used to define the metro area consistently across all six sources. Pulled 2026-09-10.