Your Future Resident: What Nearly 4,000 Older Adults and Families Told Us About Senior Living

With at least half of communities at 91% occupancy or higher (WelcomeHome Q3 2026 Benchmark), the next gains depend on understanding who’s coming next and what they expect from you. We asked almost 4,000 people: adults 65 and older and the people who influence their decisions. Voice of the Senior (VOS) has the answers you need to reach who’s coming next.

When we started researching this project, we found solid research on two groups. Organizations like Pew and AARP cover older adults broadly, and ASHA's Financial Profile of Senior Living Residents and Independent and Assisted Living Feel at Home reports cover current residents. 

The period in between, when someone is forming opinions, weighing options, and deciding whether to engage at all, has had comparatively little research. What makes someone start thinking about senior living? What do they actually understand about it? What triggers an actual search, and where do people go for information once they start one? For people who aren't searching yet but could see themselves considering it someday, what does that even look like?

A study designed to segment, not just describe

The size of VOS makes segmentation possible. A 68-year-old planning her next decade around travel and grandkids thinks about senior living very differently than an 82-year-old who's already had a health scare. Someone who keeps a folder of brochures "just in case" isn't the same person as someone who changes the subject every time a child brings it up, even if they're the same age. Someone touring three communities this month isn't in the same headspace as someone who says "maybe someday" and means it, but isn't picking up the phone anytime soon.

For comparison, recent industry research surveyed 560 seniors and 140 influencers, and the U.S. News 2026 survey covered 203 seniors and 208 influencers. VOS, with nearly 4,000 respondents, is the largest consumer study of the senior living decision journey. 

At that scale, we can segment the data into current shoppers (open and actively searching), future shoppers (open but not yet searching), and never shoppers (say they aren’t considering senior living). Within current shoppers, we look at those driven by care, lifestyle, or planning. We can also compare older adults with the family and friends helping them decide, and cut by factors like wealth, age, and marital status to see whether they shape perceptions of senior living and the shopping process. That lets us compare mindsets instead of settling for a single average.

Openness is a spectrum

The industry talks about “personalization” constantly, but personalizing anything first requires understanding and empathy. That starts with seeing how much openness varies. Some people are firmly closed off and don't want the conversation started, some would move tomorrow if the right community came along, and many people sit somewhere in between, often for very different reasons.

One distinction worth exploring is the gap between being open to senior living and being ready to search. Someone might say, "I could see myself doing that someday" and simply leave their consideration there. Any number of things could move someone from open to actively searching: A fall that lands a parent in the ER. Turning 75 and deciding it's time to stop putting it off. A spouse who passes away, leaving someone alone in a house built for two. Even within the group we're calling "future shoppers,” a person who rates their openness a three out of five and one who rates it a five out of five are meaningfully different people, though both get the same label.

Demographics alone don’t explain who is ready to search. Two 74-year-olds in similar health, living three doors apart, can land in completely different places: one is touring communities this weekend, the other hasn't thought about it once. That's exactly why segmentation matters more than population size alone. 

Why now

The obvious answer is the sheer number of baby boomers entering the age range where this decision becomes relevant, along with questions about how different their expectations may be. Even among themselves, generations have radically different life experiences, so generation itself may not be the most useful variable. The better question is what matters most when someone makes this decision: age, health, financial situation, independence, lifestyle, technology, or something more ineffable?

There are also structural shifts. People are living longer, and technology is changing what healthy aging looks like. Investment is flowing into senior living at a pace that reflects real demographic need, which puts more pressure on operators to answer a basic question: what should we do for the people we’re meant to serve?

Operators are already responding to these shifts. Our Voice of the Industry (VOI) research asks operators what they're seeing and how they're responding. VOI tells us the industry is revamping websites, prioritizing speed to lead, making information easier to access without a phone call, seeing prospects arrive more informed, adapting to AI's effect on search, and shifting toward relationship-led, personalized selling.

All of that investment rests on a belief that the consumer is changing in specific ways. VOS tests that belief against the perspectives of the consumer themselves. The industry says it needs better digital presence; VOS asks whether people are even using websites, and what they're looking for if they do. The industry says it needs personalization; VOS asks what mindsets exist to personalize around in the first place. 

VOI tells us what the industry sees and how it's responding. VOS tells us what the people on the other end of that response think.

Assumptions worth testing

Operators tell us the same things again and again. People want to stay home. They don't want change. Independence matters more than anything else. Senior living is too expensive. People will wait until their health declines to even consider it. We didn’t set out to prove any of this wrong. We asked directly so each assumption could be tested against what people told us. 

Some of what the industry believes holds up. Some doesn’t, and some is true but misread. Three early findings from the Q3 2026 data drop:

• Most older adults are open. Eight in 10 are at least moderately open to senior living, and among those open but not yet looking, 84% say they don’t need it yet.

• “Never” often means “not unless.” Of those who say they aren’t considering senior living, 45% would consider it if their circumstances changed. Only about one in four have ruled it out for good.

• Planners are already in the funnel. Six in 10 older adults searching now name planning ahead as one of their reasons, though that includes many whose needs are already pushing them.

Source: 2026 Voice of the Senior Report. Higher-net-worth households were intentionally oversampled, and results are not weighted unless noted.

The reasons go beyond needing care. Current and future shoppers point to maintenance-free living, convenience, safety, and healthy aging as real motivations. The picture is far more varied than a flat "I don't want senior living."

What operators should ask themselves

Most operators have data on the people who enter their funnel and very little on everyone who doesn't.

The questions underneath it all: Are your marketing, sales process, and communities meeting these different consumers where they are? Does your messaging speak to what people care about, and is it personalized to why someone is searching? Does your sales process account for the fact that people enter this decision for very different reasons? Are you designing for the consumer you actually have, or the one you assume you’re going to have?

The full Voice of the Senior report arrives in December 2026, and we’ll walk through the findings at a virtual event on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at 2 p.m. ET.

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