GUIDE
Do you need CQC registration?
The answer comes down to one thing: whether your staff provide personal care. Not what you call the service. Here is the boundary, and the edge cases that catch people out.
Last reviewed: 05 June 2026
It is about the activity, not the label
Whether you need to register with the CQC does not depend on what you call your business. It depends on what your staff actually do. The CQC regulates a defined list of “regulated activities”, and if your service delivers one of them, you must register before you start, whatever the setting is called. The most common regulated activity, for the businesses we work with, is personal care. The CQC looks past the name on the door to the reality of the support being delivered.
What counts as personal care
Personal care means hands-on help with the things people do for themselves when they can: washing, bathing, dressing, help with using the toilet and continence, and assistance with eating where it is physical. If your staff do these things for people, you are providing the regulated activity of personal care and you must register with the CQC. Helping someone with their medication, depending on how it is done, can also fall within regulated activity. The test is physical, personal assistance with daily living.
The CQC’s defined list; personal care is one.
Not the name of the service.
Operating first can be a criminal offence.
What does not need CQC registration
Not all care and support is regulated. A service that is genuinely support-only, helping people maintain a tenancy, manage their money, build life skills, get to appointments, or take part in their community, without any hands-on personal care, may not need to register. Companionship, domestic help like cleaning and shopping, and prompting someone to do something themselves rather than doing it for them, are generally not regulated activities on their own. The line is between supporting someone to live their life and physically doing personal care tasks for them.
The edge cases
A few situations cause genuine confusion. Supported living is the big one: the housing is never regulated as care, but if your staff provide personal care within it, that triggers CQC registration. If you are planning a service like this, it is worth understanding the supported living startup costs involved. A service can drift across the line over time, starting as support-only and gradually taking on personal care tasks as people’s needs change, at which point registration becomes required. And getting it wrong is serious: providing a regulated activity without registration is a criminal offence, not a paperwork slip. If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, that is exactly what to settle first.
We will tell you straight whether you need to register
The first thing we do on a consultation is confirm whether your service needs CQC registration, by looking at what your staff will actually do. Then we build the whole business around the answer.
CQC registration questions, answered
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