Daycare & Childcare License Leads Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Every US state that issues childcare licenses maintains a public registry. Five of those registries are published as machine-readable open-data APIs: New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, and Texas. This Actor queries each selected state's official Socrata SODA endpoint, paginates through every record, normalises the columns into a single consistent schema, and delivers one clean dataset row per licensed facility.

The state portals handle pagination internally, apply their own schema quirks, and return data in varying column layouts. We handle all of that per-state detail for you — you get a uniform output regardless of which states you select.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so state API gateways see a genuine browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or rate-limit response.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After header honoured.
• 🧱 Per-state active-only filtering — NY and CT support server-side status filters; we apply them automatically when activeOnly is enabled, so you get live facilities without post-processing.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small warm-up fee).

💡 Use cases

• B2B sales to daycare owners — pull every licensed daycare center in Texas with phone and address, then enrich with email via Clay or Apollo for a targeted outreach sequence.
• Childcare service vendors — playground equipment suppliers, catering companies, and educational software vendors can build state-level prospect lists in minutes.
• Consulting / compliance — regulatory consultants track capacity and status changes across state portfolios without scraping PDF tables by hand.
• Real estate & site selection — developers and municipalities map licensed childcare capacity by county to identify underserved areas.
• Market research — compare childcare supply across states, facility-type mix (family home vs. center), or average licensed capacity by city.
• Insurance & financial services — commercial insurers and lenders targeting childcare operators need addressable prospect lists at scale.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Select one or more states in the States to scrape field.
3. Toggle Active facilities only — enabled by default; disabling it returns expired and inactive licenses too.
4. Set Max results to cap the run size. Each state has tens of thousands of records; start small.
5. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset in real time.
6. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull via the Apify API into your pipeline.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
states	array	no	["NY"]	One or more state codes: NY, CT, CO, DE, TX.
activeOnly	boolean	no	true	Filter to active/licensed facilities. Applied on the server for NY and CT; ignored for CO, DE, TX (no status column).
maxResults	integer	no	100	Maximum total records across all selected states.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Proxy settings. Optional for low-volume runs against these open-data APIs.

Example input

{
  "states": ["NY", "TX"],
  "activeOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 500,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one licensed childcare or daycare facility. Export as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify Console.

Field	Type	Notes
state	string	Two-letter state code — e.g. NY, TX.
facility_name	string	Name of the childcare facility or daycare center.
licensee_name	string | null	Legal name of the licensee or governing body.
license_number	string | null	State-issued license or provider ID number.
facility_type	string | null	Program type — e.g. Day Care Center, Family Day Care Home.
capacity	integer | string | null	Licensed capacity in number of children.
address	string | null	Street address.
city	string | null	City.
county	string | null	County (NY, CO, DE, TX; null for CT).
zip	string | null	ZIP / postal code.
phone	string | null	Contact phone number (NY, CT, DE, TX; null for CO).
status	string | null	License status — e.g. Active, Expired. Null for CO, DE, TX.
email	string | null	Contact email (TX only).
website	string | null	Facility website URL (TX only).
source_url	string	Socrata API endpoint this record came from.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "state": "TX",
  "facility_name": "Sunshine Learning Center",
  "licensee_name": "Maria Lopez",
  "license_number": "1234567",
  "facility_type": "Licensed Child Care Center",
  "capacity": 72,
  "address": "4500 Oak Drive",
  "city": "Austin",
  "county": "Travis",
  "zip": "78701",
  "phone": "512-555-0198",
  "status": "Licensed",
  "email": "director@sunshinelearning.example",
  "website": "https://sunshinelearning.example",
  "source_url": "https://data.texas.gov/resource/bc5r-88dy.json",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-07T09:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.004	Per facility record pushed to the dataset

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $4.00. No subscription, no minimum — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit, so your first run costs nothing.

🚧 Limitations

• Five states only. NY, CT, CO, DE, and TX are currently supported. Other states publish their registries in different formats (PDFs, proprietary portals, bulk downloads); adding each requires custom integration work.
• Status filtering varies by state. CO, DE, and TX datasets don't expose a status column, so activeOnly has no effect on those states — all records are returned.
• TX email and website coverage is partial. Texas includes email and website fields, but not every operator fills them in the public registry.
• Data freshness depends on the state. Each state updates its open-data portal on its own schedule — typically daily to weekly. The scraped_at field tells you when we fetched; the underlying source may lag behind actual license changes.
• No photos, inspection reports, or violation histories. This Actor returns the registration-level metadata only. Inspection and complaint data live in separate datasets.

❓ FAQ

Is there a national childcare license database I can query?

No unified federal registry exists. Childcare licensing is administered state by state. This Actor consolidates five of the most accessible state registries into one output schema.

Can I get a licensed daycare list by city or county?

Yes — filter post-export by the city or county column. Most states include county. Alternatively, run a single-state query and filter in your spreadsheet or CRM import.

How do I build a daycare email list?

Texas is the only state in this dataset that publishes email addresses in the public registry. For other states, enrich the facility_name + address output through a tool like Clay or Apollo after export.

Why are some fields null?

Not every state publishes every field. CO has no phone column; DE and TX have no status column. We surface null rather than fabricate. The source_url field tells you which registry each record came from.

How many records are in each state?

Approximate counts at time of writing: NY ~50 000, CT ~4 000, CO ~6 000, DE ~1 200, TX ~30 000. Counts change as licenses are issued and expire.

Can I schedule this to run weekly?

Yes — use Apify Schedules to trigger a run on a cadence. The scraped_at field and the license_number make deduplication straightforward for delta workflows.

Does this scrape anything I shouldn't be using?

All data comes from official state government open-data portals published for public access. No login, no scraping private pages, no personal data beyond what the state publishes in the licensing registry.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, need a new state added, or want a field we're not capturing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in the Apify Console — we read every report and ship fixes weekly.

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