foodinspectiondata.us / reference
Public restaurant inspection data, and how to read it
Health departments publish inspection results as scores, letter grades, colored placards and open datasets. None of these systems share a scale. This site explains how each one works and what the data columns actually mean, citing the department or portal that publishes them.
The reference shelf
- FID-01Standard
LIVES, the restaurant inspection data standard
What the Local Inspector Value-entry Specification defined, file by file, who adopted it, and where it stands today.
- FID-02Guide
Why a 90 in one city is not a 90 in another
Point scales that run in opposite directions, grade cutoffs, placards and inspection frequency, city by city.
- FID-03Guide
What happened to San Francisco's restaurant scores
San Francisco stopped scoring restaurants on the 100-point LIVES scale in 2021. What replaced it, from the city's own pages.
- FID-04Directory
Restaurant inspection open-data portals
City and county inspection datasets with the last-updated date we observed, and which ones have stopped updating.
- FID-05Field guide
Reading the NYC restaurant inspection dataset
CAMIS, score versus grade, grade codes N, Z and P, one row per violation, and the traps that skew analyses.
- FID-06Field guide
Reading Chicago's food inspection data
Risk 1 to 3, pass with conditions, inspection types, and the July 1, 2018 change to violation definitions.
About this site and its domain
This resource started publishing in September 2026. It is written and maintained by Food Inspection Data editors. Every page lists the date its sources were last checked, and every fact links to where it came from: a health department page, a municipal open-data portal, or the specification itself.
The address has an older history. In January 2013, when Yelp, San Francisco and New York City announced LIVES, a common format for publishing restaurant inspection results, this domain was the place cities were pointed to. Government Technology reported that other cities could pledge to implement the LIVES standard on foodinspectiondata.us, which was part of the Code for America Peer Network, and SFist told readers outside the launch cities to send their health departments here. The domain never hosted pages of its own: archived copies from 2013 show it simply displayed Code for America's LIVES pledge page. Later it redirected to Code for America's LIVES page, then lapsed and carried unrelated content for several years.
The LIVES hub itself has been dormant for years. Code for America's LIVES page now returns an error, and San Francisco, one of the standard's co-authors, stopped using it in 2021. The full story is on the LIVES page. This site continues the domain's subject, public inspection data, as a plain reference. It does not speak for Yelp, Code for America or any city, and it does not run a pledge or a feed.
Corrections are welcome. If a portal date, a cutoff or a field definition here no longer matches its source, the source wins and the page will be fixed.