Notes / Finding records
How to Look Up a Restaurant's Health Inspection in Any State
There is no national database. Inspection is run state by state, and in half the country it is run county by county below that. Here is how to actually find a record.
The single most useful thing to know before you start: there is no national restaurant inspection database. No federal agency collects the results. Nobody in Washington holds a master list you can search.
That surprises most people, because food safety feels federal. The scale certainly is. The CDC estimates that each year in the United States roughly 48 million people get sick from contaminated food, 128,000 are hospitalised and 3,000 die (CDC, Food Safety). But restaurant inspection itself is a state and local function, and the results live wherever the inspecting agency decided to put them.
Step one: work out who inspects
Every state falls into one of two arrangements.
In about half the country, a single state agency runs inspection and publishes one statewide search. If you are in one of those states, you are done in about thirty seconds — you go to the state portal, type the restaurant name, and read the report.
In the other half, the state writes the rules and then delegates the actual inspecting to counties or cities. Twenty-four states work this way. There is no statewide search because there is no statewide dataset. Los Angeles County publishes its own records. So does Chicago. So does the small rural county two hours from either. The state health department may not hold copies of any of them.
This is the single biggest reason people conclude a record "doesn't exist." Usually it exists — it is just held one level down from where they looked.
Step two: go to the right portal
We keep a page for every state and the District of Columbia with the official lookup, who does the inspecting, and what the results look like when you find them. Start there rather than with a search engine, because search results for this are full of third-party sites that mirror official data and then stop updating it.
A warning about those mirror sites. Several national apps and directories pull inspection feeds and then display them indefinitely. A restaurant that failed in 2019, fixed everything and has passed every inspection since can still show the 2019 result on a site that never refreshed. Always confirm against the issuing agency before you act on a score.
Step three: read what you actually found
Results are published in genuinely different formats depending on where you are, and the formats are not comparable to each other.
- Letter grades. A small number of jurisdictions post an A/B/C style grade. These are the most legible to the public and the most misunderstood, because the underlying scoring differs by jurisdiction.
- Numeric scores. Common, and almost never comparable across state lines. A 92 in one state and a 92 in another can describe very different kitchens.
- Pass / fail or "in compliance". A binary outcome with the detail in the narrative underneath.
- Narrative reports only. The most common format nationally, and the most informative if you are willing to read. No score at all — just the list of what the inspector observed, coded to the relevant rule.
If you only take one habit from this piece: read the violations, not the number. A restaurant with three minor documentation findings and a restaurant with one live temperature-abuse finding can land on similar scores, and only one of those is a reason to walk out.
What to do when there is no online search
Some jurisdictions publish nothing online. That does not make the record private. Inspection reports are public records nearly everywhere, and a state has to give you a route to them.
Put your request in writing to the health department that did the inspection. Ask for inspection reports for a named business at a named address over a specific date range. Being specific about business, address and date range is what turns a slow request into a fast one. Agencies can charge reasonable copying costs, and response timelines are set by each state's public records law.
The posting rule is a shortcut most people forget
Fourteen states require the result to be displayed at the restaurant itself. If you are standing in the doorway, the answer may already be on the wall or the front window. Where posting is required and nothing is posted, that is itself worth noticing.
Two things a record cannot tell you
First, a report describes one visit. It is a photograph of a kitchen on a particular Tuesday morning, not a running average. Kitchens change — for better and for worse — between visits.
Second, a closure is not a verdict. Health departments close restaurants as a control measure to stop an immediate hazard, and reopening generally follows correction and a re-inspection. A closure that lasted two days and was followed by clean reports tells a very different story from one that repeated three times in a year.
The pattern across several reports is worth far more than any single result. That is true whether you are a diner deciding where to eat or an operator reading your own file.