Texas Childcare Licensing Records — Official HHSC Data

Get every licensed and registered childcare operation in Texas — about 15,000 facilities: daycare centers, home-based care, residential operations, and child placing agencies — in one clean dataset, pulled straight from the official Texas HHSC Child Care Licensing datasets on the state's own open-data portal, with a source link on every record.

Each record carries the state's published license status, capacity, ages served, hours, subsidy acceptance, contact details, and the state's own inspection and deficiency counters. Flip one switch and each facility also gets its cited violations — the standard violated, HHSC's risk level, the inspector's narrative, and correction dates — from the state's Non-Compliance dataset (136,000+ citations).

Parents' apps and directories get verifiable safety records; childcare suppliers and services get a clean lead list with license status and real contact fields; researchers and journalists get the state's full oversight record with per-record provenance.

Why this actor

• Official state sources only. Both datasets are published by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission on data.texas.gov. Every record links to a live API lookup of itself (source_url) — verify any row in one click. No directory-site scraping, no logins, no guessed data.
• Operations + violations, joined. Most childcare actors return a directory listing. This one can attach each facility's actual non-compliance record — narratives and risk levels included — keyed by the state's own operation id.
• A format change never becomes silent garbage. Each of the two datasets is fetched, signature-checked, and validated independently. If HHSC restructures the violations dataset, your facility records still return (with violations: null) and the failure is reported loudly in SOURCE_STATUS. You will never quietly get wrong columns.
• Honest fields. Values are carried verbatim from the state's dataset. Counters are HHSC's own figures; a blank counter is 0 by the dataset's own convention; genuinely absent text stays null. About 140 residential operations (shelters, treatment centers) have no published location — HHSC withholds it for safety, so those fields are honestly null, not guessed.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
cities	array	all	e.g. ["AUSTIN", "HOUSTON"] — case-insensitive
counties	array	all	e.g. ["TRAVIS", "HARRIS"]
operationTypes	array	all 6	see the type list below
nameSearch	string	—	case-insensitive substring on the operation name
openOnly	boolean	false	only operations currently open and not temporarily closed
subsidizedOnly	boolean	false	only operations accepting child care subsidies
minHighRiskDeficiencies	integer	—	only operations with at least this many high + medium-high deficiencies
includeViolations	boolean	false	attach cited violations per facility
maxViolationsPerOperation	integer	20	newest-first cap; violations_total always has the full count
maxRecords	integer	20000	stop after this many facilities

{
  "cities": ["AUSTIN"],
  "operationTypes": ["Licensed Center"],
  "includeViolations": true
}

Output

One dataset item per operation:

{
  "operation_id": "88451",
  "operation_number": "170037",
  "operation_name": "Open Door Preschool North",
  "operation_type": "Licensed Center",
  "address": "2818 San Gabriel St", "city": "AUSTIN", "county": "TRAVIS",
  "state": "TX", "zip": "78705",
  "phone": "(512)555-0100", "email": "…", "website": "…",
  "issuance_date": "2002-04-12", "type_of_issuance": "Full Permit",
  "open": "Y", "temporarily_closed": "NO",
  "conditions_on_permit": null, "corrective_action": null, "adverse_action": null,
  "capacity": 60, "ages_served": "Infant, Toddler, Pre-Kindergarten",
  "programs": "Educational Program", "hours": "07:30 AM-05:30 PM",
  "days": "Monday-Friday", "accepts_subsidies": "Y",
  "total_inspections": 12, "total_assessments": 3,
  "total_reports": 2, "total_self_reports": 1,
  "deficiencies_high": 1, "deficiencies_medium_high": 2,
  "deficiencies_medium": 4, "deficiencies_medium_low": 0, "deficiencies_low": 1,
  "violations_total": 8,
  "violations": [
    {
      "non_compliance_id": "1004673383",
      "standard": "745.641 - AP Background check results…",
      "risk_level": "Medium High",
      "narrative": "…the inspector's own words…",
      "corrected_at_inspection": "N",
      "corrected_date": "2023-02-17",
      "correction_verified_date": "2023-02-21",
      "technical_assistance_given": "NO"
    }
  ],
  "source_url": "https://data.texas.gov/resource/bc5r-88dy.json?operation_id=88451",
  "dataset_page": "https://data.texas.gov/dataset/HHSC-CCL-Daycare-and-Residential-Operations-Data/bc5r-88dy",
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-05T20:41:02Z"
}

violations/violations_total appear only when includeViolations is on (null if the violations source failed that run — never silently missing).

The run also writes SOURCE_STATUS to the key-value store: per-source status (ok/failed), record/parse counts, timing, and a floor warning if an unfiltered run returned suspiciously few facilities.

The 6 operation types (state's own categories, with current counts)

Type	~Count	What it is
Licensed Center	9,600	classic daycare/preschool centers
Registered Child-Care Home	1,750	home-based care, registered
Licensed Child-Care Home	1,600	home-based care, licensed
Listed Family Home	1,400	small home-based care, listed
General Residential Operation	425	residential care (shelters, RTCs)
Child Placing Agency	240	foster/adoption agencies

Honest limitations

• Coverage is Texas — this is deliberately one state done completely from its official source, not fifty states done from a directory site.
• Deficiency counters and the violations dataset cover the window HHSC itself publishes (roughly the last 2–5 years of citations); this actor can't extend what the state publishes.
• ~140 residential operations have no published city/county/address — HHSC withholds locations of shelters and treatment centers for safety. City/county filters can't match them (they appear in statewide pulls).
• A full statewide pull takes ~20 seconds; statewide with violations takes ~90 seconds (the violations join runs one polite query per 100 facilities). City or county runs take a few seconds.

Typical usages

• Parent-facing directory or app: {"openOnly": true, "includeViolations": true} — the full verifiable safety record behind every facility page.
• Supplier lead list: {"operationTypes": ["Licensed Center"], "openOnly": true} — 9,600 centers with phone/email and capacity for sizing.
• Risk monitoring / journalism: {"minHighRiskDeficiencies": 3, "includeViolations": true} — every facility with a heavy high-risk record, with the narratives.
• Subsidy market analysis: {"subsidizedOnly": true} by county.

Legality

These are public records Texas publishes on its official open-data portal (data.texas.gov) specifically for public reuse: no logins, no paywalls, no scraping of private sites. Contact fields are the business contact details the state itself publishes for each licensed operation.