Methodology
Everything on this site comes from records the State of Texas publishes. This page says exactly which records, how we handle them, what we refuse to do with them, and what they cannot tell you.
Where the data comes from
Texas Health and Human Services Child Care Regulation publishes its licensing and inspection data as open data at data.texas.gov. We read five datasets through the public API. We do not scrape, and nothing here is obtained from the state any other way.
| Dataset | ID | Records | What we use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daycare and Residential Operations | bc5r-88dy | 12,918 listed | Name, address, license, capacity, ages, hours, subsidy acceptance |
| Inspection / Investigation / Assessment | m5q4-3y3d | 205,219 | Every recorded state visit and its date |
| Non-Compliance | tqgd-mf4x | 132,633 | Citations, risk level, correction status, inspector narrative |
| Sections and Standards Evaluated | ywgb-2ig8 | 955,786 | Which standards were checked at each visit |
| Day Care Abuse/Neglect Investigations | txmx-ceda | 3,385 | County totals only. See the warning below |
The inspection record runs from October 1, 2017 to November 6, 2026. Anything older than that is not in the published data and so is not here. We last retrieved it on November 7, 2026.
Which programs we list
We list the three licensed and registered categories that care for children in a regulated setting:
- Licensed Center, 9,594 active
- Registered Child-Care Home, 1,729 active
- Licensed Child-Care Home, 1,595 active
We do not list these, and the reason is different for each:
- Listed Family Home, 1,378 active. The minimally regulated tier: around three children each, and roughly one citation for every three operations across nine years. There is almost no inspection record to publish, which is what this site is for.
- General Residential Operation, 413 active. Residential treatment, not childcare.
- Child Placing Agency, 225 active. Foster placement, not childcare.
What the risk levels mean
The five labels are the state's, not ours. HHSC assigns one to every citation based on the standard that was violated, reflecting how much harm a breach of that standard could cause.
- High 32,359 citations
- Medium High 54,282 citations
- Medium 38,731 citations
- Medium Low 5,133 citations
- Low 2,128 citations
What a citation is, and is not
A citation is a finding by a state inspector on a particular day, about a particular standard. It is a fact about that visit. It is not a verdict on the program today, and a program with more citations is not necessarily worse than one with fewer: an operation open for fifteen years has had far more inspections than one open for two, and a larger center is held to more standards than a home.
That is why every citation on this site appears with its date and its correction status, and why we show the median for the surrounding city rather than any kind of comparison between programs.
Correction status
We report what the state recorded, in four states, and never collapse them into one:
- Corrected at inspection
- The inspector recorded that it was put right during the visit.
- Correction verified
- The operation reported a correction and the state confirmed it on the date shown.
- Reported corrected, not yet verified
- The operation reported a correction. The state's data does not record a verification. We do not treat this as resolved, because the state has not said so.
- No correction recorded
- The published data contains no correction for this citation. That may mean it is outstanding, or that the record is simply incomplete.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not grade, score, rank or star-rate any program. A score would be our characterization of somebody's regulated business rather than the state's record of it. The state's five labels and the raw counts are what we publish.
- We do not publish a "worst" list. For the same reason.
- We do not paraphrase an inspector. Where a narrative exists we quote it exactly, including the state's own typographical errors. 132,440 of 132,633 citations carry one.
- We do not put county abuse and neglect statistics on a provider page. That dataset is a county-level total with no link to any individual operation. Showing it beside a named program would imply something false about that program.
- We do not treat a pending investigation as a finding. 1,271 recorded visits have an undetermined outcome. We show them as undetermined rather than as "no violation found".
Locations
HHSC publishes coordinates for very few operations, so we derive them from the published address using the US Census Bureau geocoder. We have a location for 11,680 of 12,918 listed programs, or 90.4%.
The remaining 1,238 have no coordinates we are willing to publish. Most are on streets too new to appear in the Census road file. We would rather show no location than an approximate one, so those programs are excluded from distance-based results rather than placed somewhere nearby.
What this data cannot tell you
These are real limits, and we would rather state them than have you discover them.
- It covers October 1, 2017 onward. Anything earlier is not published.
- An absence of citations can mean a well-run program, or a program the state has visited rarely.
- Nothing here reflects what a program is like today. Staff change, owners change, and the register records none of that.
- The state's data is itself occasionally wrong or incomplete. When we can tell, we say so; mostly we cannot.
- We hold no inspection reports beyond what HHSC publishes, and no complaints made directly to us.
- None of this is a substitute for visiting. Walk the rooms, meet the staff, and ask about anything you read here.
Corrections
If you operate a listed program and a record here is wrong, out of date, or missing context, write to corrections@childcaretx.com. We will publish your response beside the record.
Where the error is in the state's data rather than ours, we will say so and point you at HHSC, who are the only people who can change it. We do not alter the state's record, because the value of this site rests on it being reproduced exactly.