Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac, Maryland
Why this exists
Written by the person who checks the licenses, so you know who is making the judgement and on what basis.
When my aunt was diagnosed with ALS, my sisters and I became her caregivers overnight. We had no idea what was happening or what to do. She had already decided one thing for herself, and she was immovable about it: she was going to stay in her own home. So we learned to coordinate her care around that decision, knowing she would eventually be unable to direct it herself.
We were taken advantage of more times than I want to count.
Eventually we started doing something that seems obvious in hindsight. Before anyone came into the house, we checked their license and their insurance ourselves, with the agency that issued it. Not the certificate they handed us. The registry. It changed everything, and I have never understood why it is not the first thing every family is told to do.
She died eight years later. A year after that, another relative was diagnosed with a form of dementia, and this time we knew exactly what to do. That is the whole difference between the two experiences, and it is the only reason this directory exists. That knowledge should not take eight years and a death to acquire.
What that means in practice
This is not a review site and it is not a lead service. I do not sell leads and I take no referral fee, so a family who finds a provider here contacts them directly and I earn nothing either way. That is deliberate. The moment I get paid per introduction, my incentive stops being accuracy.
Every business listed here was confirmed against the register that licenses it, not from a document sent to me. A verified badge additionally requires a signed listing agreement and a current certificate of insurance on file, and it carries the month the check was done, because a check with no date is not a check.
A badge is not a recommendation and it never will be. It means the credential was real on the date I looked. Quality of care is not something I can verify and I will not pretend otherwise, which is why the verification standards page lists what I deliberately do not check.
Read the full verification standards, including what is deliberately not checked.
Disclosure
This directory is published by MMG Associates, LLC, trading as The Verified Register. The same company has offered commercial cleaning and post-construction cleanup. Rather than list residential cleaners and ask you to take my impartiality on faith, I removed that category from the directory altogether. It is the one part of this market I am not the right person to judge.
My family are also current clients of one of the home care agencies listed here. That agency receives no preferential placement, pays the same rate as any other listing, and faces the same registry check as everyone else, or it carries no badge at all.
I state both of these because a directory that asks you to trust its judgement owes you its conflicts, and you should hear them from me rather than find them out later.