Entrance-Fee Contracts at Central Ohio Life Plan Communities

Ohio has exactly one law on the books about continuing care retirement communities, it was written in 1987, and it does not require anyone to show you a disclosure statement before you write a six-figure check.

By Ray Kessler, Certified Senior Advisor & Family Consultant · Published August 14, 2026

The Largest Check Most Families Will Ever Write for Housing

There is a particular kind of appointment that happens all over central Ohio — in a marketing office in Dublin, at a table in Granville, in a model apartment off Neil Avenue. A couple in their late seventies is shown a floor plan, walked past a dining room, introduced to a nurse, and handed a residency agreement. Somewhere in that agreement is an entrance fee: a one-time payment, frequently six figures, made up front in exchange for the right to live on that campus and to move through its levels of care as needs change.

Families approach this the way they approach buying a house, which is understandable and slightly wrong. When you buy a house in Worthington, an entire apparatus stands between you and a bad outcome — a licensed agent, a title search, a recorded deed, an inspection, an appraisal, statutory disclosure forms, and a lender with its own reasons to check the numbers. When you hand a life plan community an entrance fee, almost none of that apparatus exists in Ohio. What you have instead is a private contract and a statute from 1987.

This is not an argument against life plan communities. Several of the best senior living environments in our seven-county region are entrance-fee campuses, and for the right household the model does something no rental can: it converts an unpredictable future care expense into a known one. It is an argument that the diligence a central Ohio family has to do here is diligence nobody else is going to do for them.

Ohio's One CCRC Statute, and What It Actually Says

Ohio Revised Code 173.13 is titled "Continuing care facility residents' rights." It became effective October 20, 1987 and has not been substantively amended since — the text still refers to a board member as "him." It is the only section of Ohio law that addresses continuing care retirement communities as such.

It defines the two terms that matter. "Continuing care" means the provision under a written agreement of board, lodging, medical services, nursing, and other health-related services to a person sixty years of age or older, unrelated to the provider, for the life of the person or for a period in excess of one year, in return for the payment of an entrance fee or of periodic charges. An "entrance fee" is an initial or deferred payment of money or other property made in consideration for acceptance of the person as a resident.

Then it grants five rights, and they are genuinely useful once you know they exist:

Board representation. Under division (B), residents may determine annually whether they wish to elect a resident to serve on the board that operates the facility, by simple majority vote at a meeting called for that purpose with at least seven days' notice. The board must accept that resident — and here is the part to read carefully — as a nonvoting member, giving them notice of and permitting them to attend all board meetings. A seat at the table, not a vote at the table.

Audited financial reports on request. Division (C) is the most practically powerful sentence in the statute: every facility that provides continuing care shall, upon request, provide its residents and prospective residents with copies of any of its audited annual financial reports. Prospective. Before you sign.

Self-organization. Division (D) gives residents the right of self-organization — the legal basis for a residents' association that the operator cannot simply refuse to recognize.

Quarterly financial meetings. Division (E) requires the operating board, or a committee of it, to meet at least quarterly with residents or a residents' committee to discuss facility income, expenditures, and financial matters, and proposed changes in policies, programs, and services, with seven days' notice. Note the verb: discuss. Residents get information and a hearing, not approval power over a fee increase.

A private right of action. Division (F) permits a resident to bring a civil action to enforce any of these rights — which is also the tell that no state agency will enforce them for you.

What Ohio Law Does Not Give You

The absences are more consequential than the provisions, and every one of them is standard consumer protection in states that license these communities.

There is no disclosure statement requirement in Ohio. No statute obliges a community to give a prospective resident a standardized document setting out its ownership, financial condition, occupancy history, reserves, or fee history before the contract is signed. There is no rescission or cooling-off period — no statutory window to cancel and recover an entrance fee after signing. There is no escrow or reserve requirement for entrance fees, and no statutory refund formula or refund timeline. There is no registration, filing, or public registry with the Ohio Department of Aging, which has no review or enforcement role over these contracts at all, and no rulemaking authority delegated to it by 173.13.

What that means in practice is that a family in Delaware County comparing two campuses has no state-published document to compare, no state comparison tool, and no agency to call about the contract itself. The Ohio Department of Aging's Long-Term Care Consumer Guide covers nursing homes and residential care facilities — it is not a CCRC guide and does not address entrance fees or contract types. The Ohio Department of Insurance regulates long-term care insurance, not these communities. This is a real gap, and it is worth knowing about before rather than after.

Who Actually Discloses, and Who Doesn't

Because the state requires nothing, disclosure in central Ohio is a voluntary practice — and the spread between operators is wide. We verified this against operators' own websites, never against third-party listing sites.

At the transparent end, Otterbein Granville in Licking County publishes the mechanics of two different contract options — one with a lower entrance fee where inpatient care is discounted for a defined number of days and then converts to market rate, and one with a higher, prepaid entrance fee and equalized pricing — along with several refund structures, including declining-balance and partially refundable plans. Friendship Village of Dublin publicly describes its life care model, in which residents pay an entry fee plus a monthly fee that stays nearly the same regardless of how much care is needed, and states a refund percentage in its own materials. First Community Village in Upper Arlington identifies itself as a CCRC and names its life care plan as carrying a one-time entrance fee in exchange for reduced, predictable future care rates.

In the middle sit operators who publish price but not structure. The Life Enriching Communities campuses — Wesley Glen in Clintonville, Wesley Ridge in Reynoldsburg, and Wesley Woods in New Albany — publish dated entrance-fee and monthly-fee tables on their public pages, including both standard and partially refundable entrance-fee structures. What is not stated is the care-coverage contract type, so the promise of priority access to the continuum should be read in the residency agreement rather than inferred.

At the other end are campuses that use the language without the numbers. Ohio Living Westminster-Thurber describes itself as a life plan community but publishes no contract type, entrance fee, or residency-agreement structure — prospects are routed to an inquiry form. Wexner Heritage Village in Bexley operates independent and assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, and hospice on one campus, and yet never uses the phrase "continuing care retirement community" or "life plan community" on its site at all.

Draw the right conclusion from that last paragraph. Not disclosing is not evidence of a problem — Ohio does not require disclosure, so silence is the default rather than a signal. It simply means that in this state, the burden of asking falls entirely on you.

"Full Continuum" and "Entrance Fee" Are Not the Same Thing

This trips up more central Ohio families than any other single point, because the two models look identical on a tour.

Several full-continuum campuses in our region — including health campuses in New Albany, Hilliard, Gahanna, Pickerington, and Lancaster — offer independent living through skilled nursing on a single site while operating on a month-to-month rental basis with no entrance fee whatsoever. A resident walks the same hallway, eats in the same dining room, and can transfer to the same rehab wing. What differs is entirely contractual: there is no capital at risk, no refund schedule to negotiate, and correspondingly no rate protection if care needs escalate.

The label is unreliable in the other direction too. At least one Ohio Living community in Delaware County is marketed as a life plan community despite having no independent living component at all. So the operative question on a tour is never "is this a CCRC?" It is two narrower questions: is there an entrance fee, and what does it buy me when my health changes? Our CCRC versus standalone assisted living comparison works through that trade-off, and what a CCRC actually is covers the vocabulary in short form.

Where the Entrance Fee Collides With Medicaid

Families often assume an entrance fee, once paid, is gone from the balance sheet for eligibility purposes. Ohio's rule says otherwise, and it is specific.

Ohio Administrative Code 5160:1-6-02.3, effective January 1, 2024, provides that an individual's entrance fee for admission to a CCRC or life care community is considered an available resource when all of three conditions are met: the entrance fee can be used to pay for care under the terms of the entrance contract when the individual's other resources or income are insufficient; the individual is eligible for a refund of any remaining entrance fee when the individual dies or terminates the contract and leaves; and the entrance fee does not confer an ownership interest in the community.

Because the test is conjunctive, contract structures that confer an equity or ownership interest, or entrance fees that are entirely non-refundable, fall outside it. That is a planning-relevant detail rather than a loophole to chase — the choice of refund structure at signing can have consequences years later that have nothing to do with the number itself. Anyone weighing a large entrance fee alongside a possible future Medicaid application should be doing that arithmetic with an Ohio elder law attorney, not with a marketing director.

If the Operator Fails

This is the scenario nobody raises on a tour, and it deserves one honest paragraph.

Ohio has no CCRC-specific statutory lien, trust, priority claim, or escrow protecting an entrance fee in an insolvency. Unless the residency agreement creates a security interest — and most do not — a resident holding an unrefunded entrance fee is generally a general unsecured creditor, standing behind secured lenders and bondholders. Ohio Medicaid rules do contemplate a failing nonprofit provider in a narrow way, disregarding the entrance fee as a resource where a philanthropic long-term care facility can show it is financially unable to operate and the fee would have been depleted at Medicaid rates — a provision that exists precisely because these failures happen.

There is a second wrinkle worth stating plainly. Ohio's transfer and discharge protections in ORC 3721.16 — the thirty-day certified-mail notice and the hearing right we covered in detail here — apply to residents of licensed nursing home and residential care facility beds. Independent living apartments on a life plan campus are not licensed under Chapter 3721, so an independent living resident has no such notice or hearing right. Their protections are the contract and ORC 173.13. And when a home closes because its license was revoked or it is being shut down, the hearing right is removed by statute even for licensed beds.

What to Actually Do Before Signing

Five concrete steps, in order, and none of them require a lawyer to start.

One: make the 173.13(C) request in writing, as a prospective resident. Ask for copies of the community's audited annual financial reports — that phrase, verbatim. Ask for the last three years. A community that produces them and shares them readily has told you something; a community that cannot produce audited statements has told you something different.

Two: ask to attend a quarterly residents' financial meeting under division (E), or at minimum to see the minutes. The residents already in the building know what the fee history looks like.

Three: get the entrance-fee refund terms in writing and read them against a calendar. Is it declining-balance, and over how many months? Is a refund paid on move-out, or only after the unit is re-occupied? That second condition is common and it is the difference between a refund and a hope.

Four: get the care-coverage promise in writing. "Priority access" and "guaranteed care at the same monthly rate" are different products. Ask what happens to the monthly fee on the day a resident moves from independent living to skilled nursing, in dollars per month, and ask for the clause that says so.

Five: ask what happens if only one spouse needs to move. Couples' provisions vary enormously and are rarely covered in a first meeting.

Statutes, administrative rules, and operators' published terms all change. Everything above reflects the Ohio Revised Code, the Ohio Administrative Code, and what these operators published on their own websites at the time of writing, and every point should be confirmed against the current text and directly with the community before you rely on it. Nothing here is legal, financial, or medical advice, and a contract of this size is worth an hour of an Ohio attorney's time before signing, not after.

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