Texas childcare data

Retrieved 2026-08-16. Statewide.

Where it comes from

Every record on the Texas pages is imported from four datasets published by Texas Health and Human Services, Child Care Regulation, on the state open-data portal at data.texas.gov. They are released into the public domain (CC0) and refreshed daily by the agency.

• Operations (bc5r-88dy): one row per regulated operation. Name, address, permit type, capacity, ages, hours, subsidy acceptance, and cumulative deficiency counts by risk level.
• Inspections (m5q4-3y3d): one row per inspection, self-reported incident, or assessment.
• Standards evaluated (ywgb-2ig8): every minimum standard an inspector evaluated at each visit. This is the denominator that makes a violation rate meaningful.
• Non-compliance (tqgd-mf4x): every cited standard, with the Texas Administrative Code reference, the inspector’s narrative, the risk level Texas assigns, and correction dates.

What I changed, and what I did not

• I excluded General Residential Operations and Child Placing Agencies. Texas regulates them in the same system, but they are residential treatment and foster placement, not childcare. That leaves 14,337 childcare operations statewide.
• I split the inspections feed into three kinds that Texas stores together: inspections (a state visit), self-reported incidents (the operation reporting to the state), and assessments. They are shown separately because they are different kinds of record.
• I geocoded addresses with the US Census Bureau geocoder, because Texas publishes no coordinates. Unmatched providers are excluded from every distance-based module rather than given an approximate position.
• I fixed apostrophes the export mangles into question marks (“child?s” becomes “child’s”). Nothing else in a narrative is altered.
• I did not assign, model, or infer any severity. Risk levels shown are the ones Texas assigns, attributed as such.
• I did not add a pass or fail result. Texas publishes none. Each inspection shows only how many standards, if any, were cited.

Definitions

• Cited standard: a minimum standard from the Texas Administrative Code that an inspector recorded as not met. Texas calls this a deficiency or non-compliance.
• Risk level: Texas HHSC’s five-tier classification of a standard (High, Medium High, Medium, Medium Low, Low). It describes the standard, not the incident.
• Corrected at inspection: Texas recorded the issue as fixed during the visit itself.
• Licensed capacity: the maximum number of children the permit allows at one time.

How city lists are ordered

• The default order on a city page has two parts. Programs that families most often find when they search the web for daycare or childcare in that city are listed first, in the order they are found. Every other program follows in a rotating order that treats large and small programs alike, so nobody is buried by name or by size.
• Nothing about the order is paid, and nothing in it comes from inspection records. Filtering by ZIP or by feature keeps the same order; choosing a sort (largest capacity, name, newest license, closest to me) replaces it.
• The web-search part is refreshed about once a month; the rotation changes deliberately, never per visit.

Texas figures

• 14,333 licensed childcare operations across 822 cities, 9,615 centers and 4,714 home-based.
• 124,738 inspections and 122,180 cited standards on record.
• 13,004 of 14,333 addresses geocoded (91%).
• Of all cited standards, 11% were recorded as corrected at the inspection itself.
• Cited standards by Texas risk level: Medium High 51,395, Medium 35,373, High 29,730, Medium Low 4,014, Low 1,668.

Limitations

• The state record carries a phone number for most operations and a website for some; I do not show them yet. Quality rating, tuition and languages are not in the record at all. Those fields read “Not available” on provider pages rather than being filled from elsewhere; providers can add them by claiming their listing.
• Deficiency counts on the operation record are cumulative since licensing. A center licensed in 1985 has had many more inspections than one licensed in 2024. Compare rates, not counts.
• Data was retrieved on 2026-08-16 and is not yet refreshed on a schedule.

Citing this data

Cite Texas HHSC as the source of the underlying records and Daycare Index for any derived statistic, with the retrieval date. Statistics on this page are recomputed from the records at build time and can be reproduced from the datasets above.