Childcare & Daycare Licensing Scraper

Scrapes state childcare/daycare licensing directories — provider name, address, license status, capacity, and (where the state publishes it) quality rating and deficiency counts.

Unlike nursing homes (one federal CMS dataset covers all states), childcare licensing has no national aggregator — every state runs its own system. That fragmentation is exactly why nobody's built this: it's a 50-state grind, not a hard technical problem. This actor uses a state-adapter architecture so coverage grows over time without changing how it's used — same state input either way, more states added as adapters are built.

Currently supported

State	Status	Providers	Data freshness	Notes
TX	✅ Live	14,368	Live/real-time	Real JSON API, no Cloudflare, no login
CA	✅ Live	39,184	Snapshot dated 2025-05-25	State open-data (CKAN) mirror — see caveat below
NY	✅ Live	16,712	Updated daily	State open-data (Socrata) mirror; excludes NYC — see caveat below

More states added over time. Request one if you need it.

No API key required

• TX: Texas Health & Human Services Child Care Regulation public search API (childcare.hhs.texas.gov) — a real POST/JSON endpoint behind an anonymous, auto-issued Bearer token.
• CA: California's own open-data portal (data.ca.gov), CKAN datastore_search API, combining the Child Care Centers and Family Child Care Homes resources.
• NY: New York State's own open-data portal (data.ny.gov), Socrata SODA API, dataset cb42-qumz ("Child Care Regulated Programs").

No scraping, no browser, no Cloudflare fight for any of the three states.

⚠️ California data freshness caveat

California's live facility-search tool (ccld.dss.ca.gov) was down at build time — the site itself displayed: "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with the Facility Search and Download Data features... Please try your facility search and/or data download again later." Rather than build against a broken tool, this adapter uses California's official open-data mirror instead, which is unaffected by that outage.

The trade-off: that mirror is a periodic snapshot, not live. Every record's dataSnapshotDate field currently reads 2025-05-25 — over a year old as of this build — even though the CKAN catalog listing itself shows a recent "last touched" timestamp (only the catalog entry was re-indexed; the underlying data file was not refreshed). This is disclosed on every CA record via dataSnapshotDate, not hidden. If the live CCLD tool comes back up, a future version could switch to scraping it directly for current data.

Also unlike Texas: CA's open dataset does not include a star rating or deficiency count (CA does publish inspection reports, just not in this bulk file) — those fields are left blank on CA records rather than fabricated. Family Child Care Home addresses read "Unavailable" by law (a genuine legal restriction per the CCLD site's own FAQ, not a bug).

⚠️ New York coverage caveat

ocfs.ny.gov — the state agency's own domain, where the live search tool lives — refused or reset every connection attempted from the build environment, both via direct HTTP request and a real browser navigation. This wasn't one flaky request; the domain was unreachable outright. This adapter uses New York's official Socrata open-data mirror instead (data.ny.gov), which is fully reachable and — unlike California's mirror — is documented as updated daily, so this is effectively live data.

Scope gap, disclosed honestly: this dataset explicitly excludes New York City day care centers — NYC has its own regulator (the NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene), separate from state-level OCFS. NYC's own facility search tool returned an HTTP 403 when checked and isn't covered here. If NYC coverage matters for your use case, this adapter doesn't provide it yet.

Also like CA: no violation/deficiency count is exposed in this dataset (though each record does include a profileUrl link to the facility's official OCFS page, where a human could look up violation history OCFS doesn't bulk-publish).

Use Cases

• Childcare franchise/PE roll-up site selection — map every licensed provider in a target market, filter by capacity
• M&A deal sourcing — find acquisition targets by provider type, license status, capacity
• Compliance/risk research — screen by license status (TX: deficiency count; NY: License vs. Registration vs. Suspended vs. Pending Revocation — a real compliance signal)
• Competitive market mapping — see the full licensed landscape in a region, with precise geocoordinates in TX and NY
• Historical/baseline research (CA) — the May 2025 snapshot is still useful for market-sizing and baseline mapping even though it isn't current

Input

Field	Type	Description
state	String	Required. TX (live), CA (2025-05-25 snapshot), or NY (daily, excludes NYC).
providerName	String	Optional — only return providers whose name contains this text (server-side filter on all three states, verified working on each).
maxResults	Integer	Maximum providers to return. 0 = no limit (default). Full TX ≈ 14,368; full CA ≈ 39,184; full NY ≈ 16,712.

Note: there is no location/city filter in this version. Texas's underlying API's location search requires a resolved lat/long + radius (from a client-side geocoder), not a plain city string — a raw city parameter was tested and confirmed to have no effect on TX (it silently returned the full unfiltered statewide set), so it isn't exposed rather than shipping a filter that quietly does nothing. Pull the full state and filter client-side for now.

Output

Field	Description
providerId	State-assigned provider/facility identifier
providerName	Facility or home name
providerType	e.g. Licensed Center (TX) / Day Care Center (CA, NY)
address, city, state, zipCode, county	Location (CA family-home addresses may read "Unavailable" by law)
licenseStatus	e.g. Full Permit (TX) / Licensed, Closed (CA) / License, Registration, Suspended, Pending Revocation (NY)
licenseIssueDate	Date of current license
licenseExpirationDate	License expiration date — NY only
closedDate	Closure date, if closed — CA only
capacity	Total licensed capacity
starRating	State quality rating — TX only, blank elsewhere
deficiencyCount	Citations/deficiencies on record — TX only, blank elsewhere
agesServed	Age groups served — TX only
acceptsSubsidy	Accepts subsidized/voucher care — TX only
licensee	Licensed owner/operator of record — CA and NY
latitude, longitude	Geocoordinates — NY only in this version
profileUrl	Link to the facility's official state profile page — NY only
dataSnapshotDate	Snapshot date for non-live states (CA); blank for live states (TX, NY)
phone, email	Contact info, where available
scrapedAt	Timestamp when the record was collected

Example Input

All Texas providers (live data):

{ "state": "TX" }

All California providers (2025-05-25 snapshot):

{ "state": "CA" }

All New York providers (daily, excludes NYC):

{ "state": "NY" }

Providers matching a name in any state (e.g. a chain/brand audit):

{ "state": "NY", "providerName": "KinderCare" }

Notes

• Data sources: Texas Child Care Search (live), California Community Care Licensing Facilities (open-data snapshot), New York Child Care Regulated Programs (open-data, updated daily).
• No API key, no rate limit encountered in testing on any of the three states.
• Real measured runtimes on the Apify platform (not estimates, not local-only numbers):
  • Full TX run (14,368 providers): ~4 min — each 2000-row page costs a flat ~30s server-side on Texas's end, independent of offset.
  • Full CA run (39,184 providers, both resources): ~8.5 min — each 5000-row page costs a flat ~70–76s, independent of offset or which resource.
  • Full NY run (16,712 providers): ~4 min 39 sec — each 5000-row page costs a flat ~77–91s, same pattern.
  • All three states show the same signature: flat per-request latency regardless of payload size or pagination offset, and platform runtimes are consistently 4–8x slower than local runtimes for the identical request pattern (CA: 93s locally vs. ~8.5 min on-platform; NY: 65s locally vs. ~4.7 min on-platform). Seeing this across three independent, unrelated state government domains points to something in Apify's own outbound network path — not a bug in this actor's code, and not something specific to any one target site. Worth the same check for any future state adapter before trusting local timing.