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.
Every licensed operation — capacity, county, inspection totals, and deficiency counts by severity — is available as clean, filterable data. Pull it for any county or severity threshold, pay per record.
Get the Texas childcare data →