The seven counties the Census Bureau defines as the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area. 93,882 Medicare beneficiaries aged 75 and over, 2,573 licensed assisted living and memory care beds, and where the two do not line up.
What the numbers say
The gap, county by county
Beds each county would need to reach the metro's own rate of licensed beds per 1,000 residents aged 75 and over. Bars to the right are short of that rate; bars to the left already exceed it. Benchmarking against the metro rather than the state is deliberate — a Birmingham county competes with the rest of the metro, not with the rural end of Alabama.
Supply on the ground
Counties shaded by licensed beds per 1,000 aged 75+. Every licensed assisted living and memory care community in the metro is a dot, sized by beds. Hover for detail.
Assisted living Memory careBeds per 1,000 aged 75+
Where demand is heading
Growth in the 75+ population since 2020, against each county's current supply rate. The counties growing fastest are not the ones with the most room.
County detail
Click a column to sort. Medicare measures are for Original Medicare beneficiaries only; the metro is Medicare Advantage, and CMS publishes no county-level MA spending.
Every licensed community
How to read this
Medicare does not record where a beneficiary lives. Claims identify the service billed, never the residence, and no public CMS file splits spend by residential setting. The supply figures here come from Alabama licensure; the Medicare figures are county-wide. They are joined by county, never by person.
Independent living is not licensed in Alabama and has no registry, so it appears nowhere in the bed counts. The 75+ and 85+ populations set against licensed beds are the closest available proxy for that market.
“Bed gap” is a relative measure, not a demand forecast. It is the arithmetic to reach the metro's own current rate — a benchmark drawn from this data, not a projection of need. A county at the metro rate is not necessarily well served; it is average.
Memory care beds are a separate Alabama licence (Specialty Care Assisted Living Facility) and are counted in addition to assisted living beds, not inside them. A campus holding both licences appears twice, correctly, with two bed counts.