Florida now requires assisted living facilities to hold a separate memory care designation before they can advertise or provide dementia care - here's what changes, what doesn't yet, and how to shop for memory care in Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties while the rules are being written.
By Orlando Senior Advisor Care Team · July 31, 2026
For years, “memory care” in Florida was a marketing term, not a license. An assisted living facility could paint a wing a different color, put a keypad on the door, call it memory care, and set its own standards for staffing, training, and admissions. There was no state definition of what the phrase had to mean.
That is now changing. CS/CS/SB 1404, signed by Gov. DeSantis on May 22, 2026 and effective July 1, 2026, creates a new memory care services specialty designation for assisted living facilities. Florida ALFs already had three specialty licenses on top of the standard one — Extended Congregate Care (ECC), Limited Nursing Services (LNS), and Limited Mental Health (LMH). Memory care is the fourth, and the first one aimed squarely at dementia.
Under the new law, an ALF must hold the memory care designation if it serves even one memory care resident or holds itself out as providing memory care services. The law defines a memory care resident as someone with Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia living in a facility that claims to provide specialized care, services, or activities for that condition — whether or not those offerings appear in the resident's contract.
The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has to write the actual standards, and it has until 2027 to adopt them. Those rules must cover, at a minimum: standardized admission criteria, the minimum level of care and activities a memory care resident must receive, staff training requirements, physical plant requirements for the secured area, and a safety requirement that at least one awake staff member be on duty at all hours. The rules must also restrict advertising — facilities without the designation will not be allowed to use terms like “memory care,” “dementia care,” or “Alzheimer's care.”
Facilities already licensed when the rules take effect will get roughly six months to obtain the designation. New applicants will need it before they can serve a memory care resident at all.
Here is the part that matters if you are touring communities in Orlando this month: the law is on the books, but the standards behind it are not written yet. Between now and the AHCA rulemaking, “memory care” on a Central Florida brochure still means whatever that operator decides it means. The awake-overnight-staff requirement, the training minimums, the admission criteria — none of that is enforceable until AHCA adopts the rules.
So don't treat the new law as a reason to relax your own due diligence. Treat it as a preview of the questions you should already be asking. If a community in Winter Park, Kissimmee, Altamonte Springs, or The Villages can't answer them today, it will have to answer them in a year or two anyway.
Ask whether at least one staff member is awake and on duty overnight in the memory care area specifically — not just somewhere in the building. Ask how many hours of dementia-specific training staff receive beyond Florida's baseline ALF requirement, and who delivers it. Ask what the facility's written admission criteria are, and just as importantly, what would cause a discharge — families are often blindsided when a behavior or a care need pushes a resident out six months after move-in.
Ask whether the community also holds an ECC or LNS specialty license. Those determine whether your parent can stay as nursing needs grow, which is a separate question from dementia programming and one the new memory care designation does not answer. And ask, plainly, whether the facility intends to apply for the memory care designation once AHCA opens the process. An operator that hasn't thought about it is telling you something.
Every ALF in Florida is licensed by AHCA, and the license — including any ECC, LNS, or LMH specialty designations — is public. You can look up any Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake, or Sumter County community on FloridaHealthFinder, along with its inspection history. Once AHCA begins issuing memory care designations, that record should show there too.
If a community's marketing and its license don't line up, that is a hard stop, not a detail to sort out later. A tour is where you find that out.
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