Every licensed child care facility in California has a public record on the CDSS Care Facility Search. Our center pages link straight to it.
What the record shows
- Facility number: the license number, shown on each of our pages.
- Status: Licensed, On Probation, Pending, closed and others. Our listings include facilities with status Licensed or On Probation (36 statewide were on probation in the November 6, 2026 data).
- Facility type and capacity: for example "Day care center, capacity 60".
- Visits: dates of inspection visits, complaint visits and other visits.
- Citations: deficiencies cited during visits, with reports you can open.
- Regional office: the licensing office to call with questions.
How to read visit and citation counts
- Complaint visits happen after someone files a complaint; the report says whether it was substantiated.
- A citation means a regulation was not met. Read the report: some are paperwork, some are about supervision or safety.
- Larger facilities usually have more visits and more chances to be cited.
- In our listings, 3,986 of 10,350 centers show zero citations in the data; that count alone is not a rating.
We show these figures exactly as CDSS publishes them, with no scores or rankings.
Family child care homes
CDSS shows "Unavailable" for the address of family child care homes, and so do we: homes appear on our city pages with name, ZIP code, phone and capacity only. You can still look them up by facility number on the Care Facility Search.