We pulled 32,419 licensed childcare operations from three states' official inspection data — Texas, Connecticut and Delaware. In Texas alone, 57% carry at least one high-severity deficiency on record. Here is what the states' own files say — as counts and rates, never a named center.
Texas HHSC publishes a running deficiency tally for every licensed operation, bucketed by severity. Across all 14,981 Texas operations, 91.6% have at least one recorded inspection, and the citations add up fast.
Where the licensed operations concentrate — the eight largest counties by operation count.
Each state publishes inspection data differently, so these bars are not a like-for-like ranking — read each label for exactly what it counts. What they share: in every state, roughly half or more of licensed facilities have a violation on file.
Delaware's rate is highest partly because its published feed counts any cited regulation, while Texas's 57.5% is the stricter high-severity-only slice. Same story underneath: routine inspections surface a lot of correctable problems, and most of it never makes the news.
Aggregate only. Every number here is a count or a percentage across operations. We do not name, rank, or flag any individual childcare center — the public records support rollups, not a scoreboard of specific businesses.
Texas — Texas HHSC's licensed-operations dataset carries a per-operation deficiency tally in five severity buckets; "high-severity" is the published deficiency_high count ≥ 1, across all 14,981 licensed operations. Delaware — the state's compliance-review feed lists each cited non-compliance; 70.9% is the share of Delaware's 1,249 licensed facilities with ≥ 1 citation on file (a facility with no posted review is not counted as a violation and is not assumed clean). Connecticut — the state licensing-inspections feed records inspection visits that carried findings; 51.8% is the share of Connecticut's 16,189 facilities with ≥ 1 such visit on record. Because each state defines and publishes a "violation" differently, the three rates are directionally comparable, not identical measures.
Published operation, capacity, county, inspection, and deficiency fields are available as filterable data where each supported source provides them. Current pricing is shown on the Actor listing.
Get the Texas childcare data →