Senior living and assisted living
Care changes the building. Your depreciation schedule should follow.
An assisted living or memory care community carries nurse-call wiring, furniture, kitchen and laundry equipment, and site work that a plain apartment building does not. A study finds the parts that belong on a faster schedule.
The baseline
The building schedule depends on how the community runs.
Senior living sits in its own category. Some communities look and run like an apartment building, and depreciate over 27.5 years. Others bundle in enough services and short-term stays that they depreciate like a hotel or a commercial building, over 39 years. Length of stay, the level of care provided, and how the building is actually used all factor in. A study looks at your community's real facts before it picks a baseline.
What reclassifies
Where the short-life parts hide in a care community.
Nurse-call and low-voltage systems
Call buttons, pendants, and the wiring that connects them to a nurse station exist to serve residents and staff directly, not the building as a whole.
Furniture, fixtures, and equipment
Dining and common-area furniture, window coverings, and decorative fixtures are classic short-life items, the same as in any residential setting.
Kitchens and laundry
Commercial kitchen and laundry equipment, plus the hookups that serve them, are analyzed apart from the building they sit in.
Egress and site work
Accessible ramps, parking, and site lighting are 15-year land improvements, the same rule as at any care community.
The honest part
27.5 years or 39? We do not guess.
Some marketing promises one answer for every senior living property. The real answer depends on your facts: independent living with light services often reads differently than assisted living, and differently again from memory care or skilled nursing. We are not going to quote you a schedule before we look at how your community actually operates.
Assisted living and independent living usually map to the Assisted Living baseline. Memory care and skilled nursing usually map to the Nursing Home baseline. Either way, the study is built from your building's own costs and records, not a canned number.
The same is true for the equipment inside. Nurse-call wiring and kitchen hookups get classified by how they are built and what they serve, the same evidence standard we apply to any medical or residential property.See what makes a study audit-defensible.
- What a senior living study documents:
- The real property class picked from your facts, not a guess
- Nurse-call and low-voltage systems tied to what they serve
- FF&E and kitchen equipment classified item by item
- Photos and records behind each line
See what your community is worth in deductions.
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