Chicago CCRC entrance fees run into six figures — here's what Illinois' Life Care Facilities Act requires providers to disclose and refund.
By Chicago Senior Advisor Care Team · September 26, 2026
When a family in Lincoln Park or Wilmette starts touring "continuing care" communities, the paperwork looks nothing like an assisted living brochure, and that is because it is regulated under a completely different Illinois law. A licensed assisted living or shared housing establishment operates under the Assisted Living and Shared Housing Act (210 ILCS 9) and 77 Ill. Adm. Code 295, with IDPH inspecting the building and the care plan. A continuing care retirement community, or CCRC — also called a life care community — instead sells a life care contract: a long-term residency agreement, typically requiring an entrance fee and running longer than 12 months, that promises access to independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing on one campus as a resident's needs change. That contract is regulated separately, under the Illinois Life Care Facilities Act, 210 ILCS 40/1 et seq., and its administrative rules at 77 Ill. Adm. Code 396. IDPH still oversees it, through the same Bureau of Long-Term Care that inspects nursing homes, but the questions a family needs to ask are financial as much as clinical.
Illinois has roughly 90 facilities operating under life care permits, covering more than 23,000 living units, and the overwhelming majority of them sit in the Chicago metropolitan area — think The Admiral at the Lake in Edgewater, The Clare in the Gold Coast/Streeterville corridor downtown, Montgomery Place in Hyde Park near University of Chicago Medicine, Smith Village in Beverly, Three Crowns Park in Evanston, Plymouth Place in La Grange Park, Friendship Village of Schaumburg, Monarch Landing in Naperville, and The Holmstad in Batavia out toward Kane County. That concentration is not an accident: life care contracts depend on a large enough pool of financially qualified buyers to fund decades of promised care, and Chicagoland's older, higher-net-worth North Shore and near-north neighborhoods have historically supplied that market.
The entrance fee is the headline number — often anywhere from the mid-six-figures for a one-bedroom independent living unit to seven figures for a larger residence with a higher refund percentage — but Illinois law is more concerned with what happens to that money after it changes hands. Before a resident signs a life care contract or hands over a deposit, the provider must furnish a financial disclosure statement covering the community's short-term assets and liabilities, and it must file annual audited financial statements with IDPH. The Act also requires every life care provider to maintain a debt reserve fund, and IDPH's Bureau of Long-Term Care monitors those reserves, stepping in when a facility shows signs of financial distress rather than waiting for a full collapse.
A newer protection matters even more for anyone comparing Chicago communities in 2026: disclosure rules that took effect January 1, 2025 now require providers to give prospective residents pre-sale notices showing the average and median time it actually took to refund departing residents' entrance fees over the prior year, the percentage of pending refund requests that have been waiting more than 24, 36, and 60 months, and the total dollar amount of refunds still outstanding versus already distributed. Ask for that document by name — it did not exist a few years ago, and a facility that stalls on producing it is telling a family something important before a dollar has moved. Every contract also carries a 14-day rescission period after signing or after the deposit is received, whichever comes later, during which a resident can walk away with a full refund and no penalty.
Life care contracts are usually sold in a few standard shapes, and the refund percentage is the variable that moves the entrance fee price up or down the most. A fully amortizing or "Type C" style fee refunds little or nothing after an initial decline period, in exchange for the lowest entrance fee and the highest monthly service fee. A "Type B," or modified, contract — which The Clare in downtown Chicago offers with a 70% refundable option — charges a moderate entrance fee, bundles in some future care at no extra charge, and adds fees if a resident later needs a higher level of care than the contract anticipated. A "Type A," or extensive, life care contract sits at the other end: a larger up-front entrance fee that locks in unlimited future assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing at little to no additional cost, which is closer to what The Admiral at the Lake in Edgewater is selling with its three tiers of 90%, 50%, and 0% refundable entrance fee options.
The percentage a family chooses changes both the size of the check written at move-in and what comes back to a resident's estate later. A 90% refundable option at the Admiral costs more up front than the 0% option, but it preserves most of that capital for heirs or for paying down other obligations if a resident later needs to relocate or passes away. Montgomery Place in Hyde Park, Smith Village in Beverly, and the North Shore's Presbyterian Homes-affiliated communities in Evanston and Lake Forest each structure their own blend of entrance fee and refund percentage, and DuPage and Kane County options like Monarch Landing in Naperville and The Holmstad in Batavia tend to price somewhat below the lakefront and near-north Chicago communities for a comparable unit size — a pattern that echoes the same North Shore-versus-suburb cost gap families see in licensed assisted living.
Because a life care contract is a decades-long financial promise, not just a housing lease, the Act gives IDPH a specific enforcement path when a provider looks financially shaky: the Department reviews the required audited financial statements and debt reserve filings, and if a provider becomes insolvent or unable to meet its obligations, the Act directs the IDPH Director to act through the Illinois Attorney General to bring court action protecting residents and the state's interest in the reserve funds. That is a meaningfully different backstop than what exists for a resident of a standard assisted living apartment, precisely because a life care resident has often prepaid for services decades into the future.
Families should not treat that enforcement mechanism as a reason to skip their own homework. The Illinois Long-Term Care Ombudsman program — the same office that helps resolve complaints at licensed assisted living and nursing facilities statewide — also fields concerns from CCRC residents about contract disputes and quality of care, and a call there before signing can surface complaints or financial-distress history that a glossy sales brochure will not. An elder law attorney who has reviewed Illinois life care contracts before is worth the consultation fee for any entrance fee above roughly $200,000, both to translate the refund schedule into plain numbers and to check how the contract treats a second spouse if one partner needs skilled nursing while the other remains in independent living.
Start by requesting three documents by name before any tour ends in a deposit: the financial disclosure statement, the most recent annual audited financial statement filed with IDPH, and the post-2025 refund-timing notice showing average and median refund processing times and the share of refunds still pending past 24, 36, and 60 months. A community that produces all three quickly, with numbers that hold up, has passed the first real test. Second, get the refund percentage and the exact trigger for when the refund clock starts — Illinois law ties it to the unit being permanently vacated, returned to resalable condition, and any resident balance being paid to zero, which can add months beyond the date a resident actually moves out or passes away.
Third, compare the entrance-fee path against what a family could do instead: Illinois' Medicaid-funded Supportive Living Program covers services (not room and board) for residents who qualify financially through a Determination of Need assessment and cannot write a six-figure check, and it is worth ruling that path in or out before committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a life care contract. Finally, use the 14-day rescission window as intended — sign only after the financial disclosure statement, the refund-timing notice, and an elder law attorney's review are all in hand, because that window closes fast and a full refund afterward is not guaranteed the way it is inside those first 14 days.
Free, no-pressure help. Our job is to look out for families, not facilities.
Or call (877) 203-5053