About ChildCareTX
ChildCareTX publishes the Texas childcare licensing register as something a parent can read. 12,918 licensed programs, from the records Texas Health and Human Services already publishes, presented without a score attached to any of them.
What this is
Texas Health and Human Services Child Care Regulation inspects licensed childcare and publishes what it finds. That record is public, complete and almost unusable: it lives in five open-data tables addressed by license number. This site reorganises it by the questions a parent actually arrives with, which are about a city, an age and a schedule.
We add no opinion to it. Where a program has a deficiency on its record we quote the inspector's finding in the words the inspector wrote, and where a finding was corrected we say that too. The methodology page sets out which datasets we read, how often, what we exclude and what the data cannot tell you, with the live figures rather than remembered ones.
What it will not do
No ratings, no stars, no rankings, no "best" or "worst" lists. Not as a matter of taste: a licensing record describes how often an inspector visited and what they happened to look at, and compressing that into a score invents a comparison the data cannot support. A program inspected twice and a program inspected nine times do not have comparable records, and a number beside each of them implies they do.
No reviews either, for the related reason that this site has no way to establish that a reviewer ever attended a program, and a childcare review is consequential enough that getting it wrong is not a small thing.
How it earns money
Advertising, from providers, priced in public. The rate card lists what a placement costs and what it does not buy: a paid listing is labeled as paid, it never changes how a program's record is presented, and no amount of money moves a deficiency off a page or a program up an ordering. What a listing gets you is the same answer written for the provider side.
What it collects about you
Nothing, as far as we can manage. The privacy page is the binding version: no analytics on the site, no tracking pixel, no advertising network, no fingerprinting, no session recording. The shortlist is kept in your own browser and never reaches us.
If a record here is wrong
Write to corrections@childcaretx.com. If you operate a listed program and a record is wrong or out of date, we will publish your response beside the record. We do not edit the state's data to disagree with the state; we show what HHSC holds and what you say about it, which lets a reader see that there are two accounts.
Not affiliated with the State of Texas
ChildCareTX is an independent publisher. It is not part of, endorsed by or speaking for Texas Health and Human Services, and nothing here is the state's official record. The official record is at data.texas.gov, and every provider page links to the state's own listing so a reader can check us against it.