Ask what a skilled nursing facility should spend on supplies per patient day and you will not find an authoritative answer — not from CMS, not from an industry association, not from a vendor. There is no published benchmark for supply spend per patient day in long-term care. This post covers what data does exist and why it falls short, how to benchmark yourself in the meantime, and the dataset we are building to close the gap.
That a number this operationally central has no reference point is strange, and worth being precise about.
Why This Number Matters More Than Most
Per-patient-day spend is the operating metric in long-term care — reimbursement is largely fixed, census is volatile, and spend is the margin lever an operator actually controls. Every multi-facility CFO manages department budgets in PPD terms, and we've written about how to build those budgets from your own actuals.
But "from your own actuals" is the tell. Without an external reference, you can know your trend and still not know your position. Is $X on medical supplies per patient day disciplined or bloated? Are you the outlier or the norm? Operators answer by feel, by an administrator's memory of a previous employer, or not at all.
What Exists Today — and Why It Falls Short
We went looking properly. Here is the honest map:
CMS cost reports. Every certified facility files one, and the data is public. But it is published with a lag measured in years, aggregated into cost centers that don't map to how purchasing actually works, and shaped by each facility's own allocation choices. Useful for policy research; nearly useless for deciding whether your food PPD is right.
MedPAC and policy analyses. Rigorous, but built to answer policy questions — aggregate margins, payment adequacy — not "what does a well-run 120-bed facility spend on supplies per patient day."
Accounting-firm surveys. Some regional CPA firms publish fragments for their client bases. Small samples, regional skews, and — critically — inconsistent definitions of what counts as "supply spend."
Distributor and GPO data. The organizations with the deepest purchasing data in this industry are distributors — and a distributor publishing "what you should spend" is grading its own homework. That data stays proprietary, and given the conflict, arguably should.
What AI assistants say. We audit this monthly, because buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT and its peers first. When you ask about supply spend per patient day, today's engines return consumer articles about the price of a nursing home stay — cost-of-care content for families, not operator spend data. The question gets a confidently wrong genre of answer.
Why Nobody Has Published One
Three structural reasons, worth understanding because they define what a real benchmark requires:
- Definitions fragment. Does "supply spend" include food? Pharmacy? Minor equipment? Every operator draws the lines differently, so naive averages compare apples to orchards.
- Denominators fragment. Patient days depend on how you count bed-holds and leave days — the same [denominator problem](/blog/ppd-budget-tracking-guide) that complicates internal budgets, multiplied across operators.
- The data sits in silos. Distributors see slices of spend but not census. EHRs hold census but not spend. Each operator holds both — for their own buildings only. A benchmark needs spend *and* patient days, defined consistently, across many operators. Almost nobody sits where both flow together.
A procurement platform is one of the few places both streams meet. Which brings us to the fix.
The Dataset We're Building
The LTC Spend Benchmark combines two sources: a short anonymous operator survey, and anonymized, aggregated data from the Adelpo platform — which manages more than $350M in annual LTC spend across 2,500+ facilities. Ground rules, stated publicly so we can be held to them:
- Medians and ranges only — no operator-identifiable data, ever.
- No cut published below n=10. If a segment is too thin to be meaningful, it doesn't publish.
- Definitions stated in the report, so you know exactly what "supply spend" includes before you compare yourself to it.
- Survey respondents get the full report when it publishes. That's the trade: five minutes of your (anonymous) numbers for the reference table this industry has never had.
Take the benchmark survey — every response makes the eventual answer more trustworthy.
How to Benchmark Yourself Until It Exists
You don't have to wait to get value from the discipline:
- Build your internal baseline from twelve months of actuals by department — the method is in [the PPD budget guide](/blog/ppd-budget-tracking-guide).
- Benchmark across your own facilities. If you run multiple buildings, you already hold a private benchmark — provided every facility counts patient days the same way. Your best-performing building's PPD is a target the others can't dismiss as someone else's market.
- Track trend, not just level. Even without an external reference, a department PPD that drifts 10% in six months is a signal you can act on.
The Bottom Line
There is no published average supply spend per patient day for skilled nursing — the data silos and definition fragmentation that caused that gap are structural, and the parties best positioned to fix it have mostly had reasons not to. We're in a position to fix it, so we are. Until the report publishes: baseline from your own actuals, compare across your own buildings, and add your numbers to the survey so the industry finally gets its reference table.
Book a 15-minute demo to see real-time PPD spend tracking across your facilities — the internal benchmark you can have today.