The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) State of Care 2025/26 report, published in October 2026, provides an insight into the staffing challenges facing health and social care services in England. Although recruitment pressures have eased in some areas, the findings show that staffing remains closely linked to the quality and safety of care.
What Does the Report Tell Us About Staffing?
There have been improvements in recruitment and retention across adult social care. According to Skills for Care, the vacancy rate fell to 6.2% in 2025/26, its lowest level since 2015/16. This represented approximately 96,000 vacancies on any given day, a reduction of 10.5% compared with the previous year.
Despite these improvements, vacancies remained around three times higher than in the wider economy.
CQC acknowledges the improvement in workforce stability but continuous to identify staffing as a concern. Its inspections found that services rated inadequate for safety had experienced problems with recruitment processes and maintaining sufficient staffing levels. These failings contributed to breaches of regulations and affected the quality and safety of care.
These findings show how workforce pressures can affect care beyond the immediate difficulty of filling shifts. Where services struggle to recruit experienced staff or maintain appropriate staffing levels, it can become harder to provide consistent support, particularly for people with more complex needs.
What the Findings Reveal About Care Quality
The CQC’s latest assessment results provide further context for the challenges facing providers. Of the 3,783 care homes assessed, 67% were rated good and 3% outstanding overall. A further 27% required improvement, while 3% were rated inadequate.
These figures reflect overall service quality rather than staffing performance specifically. However, the CQC’s separate review of safety related inspection findings identified insufficient staffing and gaps in staff competence among the issues affecting services rated inadequate for safety.
People are more likely to receive safe, person-centred care where staffing is well managed, and teams have an appropriate mix of skills. This is particularly relevant when services support people whose requirements vary. The experience needed to provide routine personal care may differ from that required to support someone with advanced dementia or complex health needs.
Planning for Changing Staffing Requirements
Alongside the immediate challenges identified through inspections, providers are operating in a sector where workforce demand is expected to increase considerably.
Skills for Care estimates that adult social care could need an additional 410,000 posts by 2040 to meet the needs of an ageing population.
The sector also faces uncertainty around future recruitment. Skills for Care reported that the number of people recruited directly from overseas fell to approximately 30,000 in 2025/26 compared with higher levels in previous years.
The CQC identifies declining international recruitment as a potential concern for workforce stability, particularly given the contributions overseas workers have made to reducing vacancy rates.
For individual services, workforce requirements can also change much sooner. A person returning from hospital may need additional assistance, while someone whose condition has progressed may require support from staff with different experience.
These situations can alter the staffing requirements of a service without necessarily changing the number of people receiving care.
Access to additional workers with relevant experience can help providers manage these changes alongside their existing teams.
At Halo Staffing, we support health and social care providers with their staffing requirements, helping them find suitable workers for the roles and services they need to cover.
The latest CQC findings reinforce the importance of considering staff availability alongside the knowledge and experience required to support the people receiving care.
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