How Shortlist sources its data
Shortlist is a research publication. Every data point on the site — the license, the state’s inspection and complaint record, tuition, schedules, what a program says it teaches — traces back to a public source or a provider’s own statement. This page documents what gets included, where each field comes from, how much of it exists today, how often it’s refreshed, and the standards behind every value.
The same sources, the same standards, applied equally to every provider — and no provider can pay to change what its listing says or where it appears.
Shortlist lists licensed childcare providers that operate in a covered metro area. A provider appears once it meets at least one of these conditions:
Every provider that clears one of these bars is shown, even when its profile is still sparse. A missing field is information Shortlist owes the parent, not a reason to hide a program that genuinely operates — so a listing with only a name and an address still appears, and fills in as sources are found.
Shortlist covers licensed, facility-based centers and home daycare programs in the metros it has researched — currently Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Austin, the Bay Area, Charlotte, and Kansas City: 12,672 listings as of October 12, 2026. In-home nannies, individual caregivers, and unlicensed care fall outside that scope. A program whose website no longer exists, or whose license the state records as closed outright, is not shown. A license the state ended for a change of ownership, a change of location or a conversion, or revoked, stays shown with the state’s own words and date.
Different fields come from different places. Shortlist follows a tiered source hierarchy — structured authoritative sources first, per-provider scraping only when nothing better exists.
Authoritative for licensing status, capacity, license number, inspection history, and state-administered quality ratings. One API call returns structured records for an entire state.
Kansas City spans two states, and Shortlist lists only the Missouri side — Jackson, Clay, Platte and Cass counties. There are no listings for Overland Park, Olathe, Lenexa, Shawnee, Kansas City, Kansas, or anywhere else in Johnson and Wyandotte counties. That is a hole in the site, and this is the reason for it.
Until the middle of 2026, Kansas child care licensing records were held by KDHE and were public records like every other state’s on this page. On July 1, 2026 licensing moved to the new Kansas Office of Early Childhood, and the same law added K.S.A. 75-7722(f), which provides that these records “shall be confidential and shall not be subject to the open records act.” Shortlist requested the Kansas roster and inspection history under the Kansas Open Records Act in July 2026. The Office of Early Childhood denied the request on September 2, 2026, citing K.S.A. 75-7722(c) and K.S.A. 45-221(a)(30); when Shortlist asked it to reconsider, its reply of September 8, 2026 cited 75-7722(f). There is no bulk file left to ask for.
The information itself is still public. The same 2025 act requires the state to run an online search of licensed programs that includes citation history and substantiated findings (K.S.A. 75-7728), and Kansas does — one facility at a time, behind a CAPTCHA, for someone who already knows which program they are looking up. What is not available is any way to obtain the records as a set. Until Shortlist has a way to read that search at the scale a directory needs, Kansas programs stay off the site rather than appearing as a partial list. A parent comparing the Kansas side of the metro should know they are seeing nothing here, not that there is nothing there.
Not on the site today: no listing carries an accreditation value. The rule below is the one Shortlist will hold to when it does, and it is written here so a provider can see the standard in advance — a directory check is the only thing that will count, and a claim on a provider’s own website will not. Until that check has been run, Shortlist publishes nothing about accreditation either way. An absent accreditation on a listing means it was never checked, never that a program failed one.
Used to verify provider claims, never as a discovery source. If a provider claims accreditation but the directory doesn’t list them, Shortlist flags the discrepancy for review — it doesn’t silently clear the claim. Directory lag, name mismatches, and incomplete public scraping are all real reasons a legitimate accreditation may not appear.
Published parent handbooks are the single richest per-provider source — ratios, meal policies, sick policies, diapering, outdoor and screen policies often appear in one document. When a handbook is found on a provider’s website, it’s prioritized over individual subpage scraping.
Programs, tuition, philosophy, and enrollment status are read from provider websites — homepage plus targeted subpages (/programs, /tuition, /enrollment, /about, /careers). A field is filled only from an explicit statement: a printed tuition figure, a stated ratio, a named philosophy. Marketing language stays a lead until a concrete value backs it.
280 listings carry a teacher-pay figure.
Teacher pay is sourced exclusively from real job postings with explicit dollar amounts — Indeed listings, provider careers pages, and IRS Form 990 filings for nonprofit operators. Salary estimation models, metro-area averages, and review-site comp ratings are not used.
When automated sources are exhausted and gaps remain, Shortlist emails providers directly to ask for two or three specific missing fields. There’s a three-email lifetime cap per provider, weekday-only sends, and no follow-up after a non-response — outreach is the last lever, not the first.
Providers can claim their listing through the Shortlist provider dashboard and submit corrections or additions directly. Self-submitted data goes to a review queue, not straight to the public record — it’s reconciled against existing sources before being applied.
Where each public field comes from, and how much of it exists. The third column is the count of listings carrying a value, live from the database as of October 12, 2026, out of 12,672 — a field can be well defined and still be empty, and a methodology that describes the rule without the count tells you only half of what is true.
| Field | Primary source | On the site |
|---|---|---|
| License status | State licensing database | 12,606 |
| Licensed capacity | State licensing database | 12,622 |
| Program type | State licensing database | 12,591 |
| Inspection & complaint records | State licensing database | 11,036 |
| License number | State licensing database, where the state publishes one | 7,328 |
| Location (latitude, longitude) | Geocoded from the licensed address | 5,590 |
| State quality rating | State QRIS (Early Achievers, Colorado Shines, NC Star, Texas Rising Star) | 4,310 |
| Non-profit or for-profit | The licensee on the state license, then the IRS Exempt Organization file — never the name, the domain, or the kind of building | 4,171 |
| What a program teaches | The program’s own words on its own site, quoted — never a label Shortlist assigns | 1,134 |
| Age range | Provider programs page | 1,102 |
| Named teaching staff | The program’s own staff or team page — a published name is required, never an aggregate claim | 916 |
| Schedule (hours per day, days per week) | Provider programs or enrollment page; both numeric values required | 746 |
| Meals | Parent handbook → FAQ | 604 |
| Year established | The provider’s own website. The state licensing date is not used: it is when a license was issued, not when the program began. | 512 |
| Tuition | Provider tuition page; state-published rates if available | 486 |
| Staff tenure | Named teacher bios with specific years at the program — never inferred from “experienced staff” | 229 |
| Ratio (children per teacher) | Parent handbook or staff page, explicit only | 228 |
| Enrollment status | Provider enrollment page, with a date stamp on every update | 1 |
| Teacher pay | Indeed listings, provider careers pages, or IRS Form 990 filings — only real postings with explicit dollar amounts | 280 |
| Accreditation | Accrediting body directory; a provider website is a claim, never a verification | none yet |
Every populated field traces to one of the sources above. Where a field can’t be sourced, it stays empty and the record shows the gap. If a provider you know well looks sparse, it usually means Shortlist is still gathering information, not that the program is weak — a provider claim through the dashboard is the fastest way to fill it.
The thin rows are worth being blunt about, because a rule with no numbers behind it can read as a capability. Shortlist has read 2,430 provider websites looking for one; 228 of those programs published a ratio it could quote and 229 published how long a named teacher had been there. That is the yield, not a target. The thinnest rows are emptier still: no program’s careers page has produced a wage figure that clears the bar, accreditation has not been checked against a directory at all, and a single listing carries an enrollment status. Each stays blank until a real source fills it — the alternative is a state licensing minimum or a metro average standing in for a fact about one program, and a number a parent cannot act on is worse than a blank they can raise on a tour.
The counts above are read from the database, as of October 12, 2026. They are not typed and not cached — a rule the data has outgrown cannot sit here looking finished. The largest single reason a field is thin: only 2,636 of the 12,672 listings have a website on file at all, and 2,389 of those have been read — for four in five programs there is no page to read in the first place.
Where a state publishes the inspection and complaint record for its licensed providers, Shortlist shows it in full — this is the highest-stakes information on the site. Every complaint case and every routine monitoring finding on file appears on the provider’s listing, each linked to its source document so a parent can read the original. This coverage is live today in all seven metros — Seattle (Washington DCYF), Chicago (Illinois DCFS), Austin (Texas HHSC), the Bay Area (California CDSS), Denver (Colorado Department of Early Childhood), Charlotte (North Carolina DCDEE) and Kansas City (Missouri DESE Office of Childhood) — each labeled with the state agency that keeps the record. That is 255,600 records across 11,036 listings.
A listing showing no findings is not the same as a program with a clean record, and Shortlist keeps the answers apart rather than collapsing them. A listing says whether the state holds a record and reported no violations, whether the state does not list that program at all, or whether Shortlist has not read it yet. Only the first of those is a clean record, and it is the only one written as one.
Complaints come first and are always shown verbatim — a complaint is the clearest signal a parent can act on, so it is shown as the state wrote it and never held back. Each complaint case carries the dates it was received and, once closed, resolved, along with the specific licensing rule cited where the record names one; each monitoring finding carries the date of the visit. Shortlist reports what the record says and links the source — it does not layer its own verdict on top of the state’s.
No state publishes this as a clean data feed, so each one is read a different way. Washington posts per-provider PDF documents, so Shortlist scans each licensed Seattle provider’s DCYF portal record on a recurring schedule and re-reads the underlying documents whenever that record changes; Texas and California expose a per-facility lookup; North Carolina lists visits on the facility page, including the visits where the state cited nothing; Illinois publishes a compliance report PDF per provider; Missouri opens each visit from its facility portal one record at a time; and Colorado publishes no machine-readable record at all, so Denver’s findings come from an annual records request to the state. A newly filed complaint is the highest-priority output of every one of those reads.
The same treatment extends to a new metro as its state records become linkable. If a record looks wrong, email [email protected]; findings are corrected against the state’s own source, never quietly removed on request.
Whether someone takes profit out of a program is a fact about who holds its license, and every state that publishes a licensee publishes it differently. Shortlist reads that field, applies the same four rules to it in the order below, and refuses rather than guesses. 4,171 of 12,672 listings carry an answer; 4,912 have had their licensee read, so the difference between those two numbers is the programs where the record was read and still did not settle it.
Two things the page will not do. It does not read Inc. as for-profit — most registered charities are incorporated, so incorporation says the license is held by an organization and says nothing about profit. And it does not read a church, a foundation or a university as either: a church is tax-exempt automatically and need never appear in the IRS file, so its absence there is not evidence. Both of those stay blank until a register settles them.
A program’s own answer outranks all four rules. A director who states it through the provider dashboard sets it, and the weekly read leaves it alone from then on.
Where a state publishes no licensee, no rule can run. Texas and Illinois publish an owner for no provider at all, which is 6,654 listings that will stay blank until that changes — not a backlog, a ceiling. Two more states publish an owner but no field naming a person, so an individually-owned home there is read and left unresolved rather than inferred from the fact that it is a home: where a regulator does publish an owner of record, roughly a quarter of family child care homes turn out to be owned by an organization.
Provider tuition is published in wildly different formats — weekly, monthly, annual, per-semester, hourly, in installments. To make providers comparable, every price is normalized to a monthly figure:
If days-per-week varies, the lowest option becomes price low and the highest becomes price high. If the timeframe of a published price is genuinely ambiguous after applying these rules, the price is flagged for human review and not auto-committed.
Co-op caveat. Co-op tuition reflects the dollar fee only. Required parent volunteer hours are a real cost — lost work time, schedule constraints — and Shortlist discloses the volunteer requirement separately rather than burying it in the headline price.
Different fields go stale at different rates, and every value on a listing carries the month it was last checked, so a parent can see the age of the specific number they are reading rather than a site-wide “last updated” date. Refreshing is a manual run — roughly weekly, not a cron job and not a live feed — and it does not reach every metro equally. What actually runs:
| What | How it refreshes |
|---|---|
| License status and closures | On most days, for all seven metros — each state’s license list is read again. A license the state reports closed outright is no longer shown; in Washington, the state’s own page for that license must also read closed first. A program missing from the list is not treated as closed until it has been missing for at least 30 days. An ownership change, move, conversion or revocation stays shown, quoting the state. Washington’s family homes are not on the list the state publishes each day, so a change to a family home’s license status is not yet picked up. See How Shortlist handles closures. |
| Inspection and complaint records | Every run, for Seattle, Austin, the Bay Area and Charlotte — each provider’s state record is re-scanned and the underlying documents re-read where it changed. Chicago is refreshed by a separate tool; Denver is an annual records request to the state, because Colorado publishes no machine-readable record. |
| Provider websites | A stored website is re-verified after 90 days, then re-captured and re-read. A re-read that comes back empty does not wipe what is already sourced — it is flagged for a person instead. |
| Tuition, schedule, policies and the rest | Refreshed whenever a provider’s site is re-read, and whenever a provider submits an update. There is no automatic expiry on these — the checked date on the value is the honest signal, and an old date means old. |
The data on the site is a snapshot, not a live feed. State agencies publish on their own schedule, providers update their own pages on their own schedule, and Shortlist’s pulls happen on the cadence above. Before making any decision based on Shortlist data, parents should verify pricing, availability, and program details directly with the provider.
Shortlist stops listing a program when its state says the program has closed. It never decides that on its own.
One gap: Washington’s licensed family homes are not on the list the state publishes each day, so a family home closing in the Seattle area is not yet picked up.
Some licenses end while the program carries on. When the state ends a license because of a change of ownership, a move, or a conversion to a new license, the program stays listed with the state’s own words and date. A revoked license stays listed too, with the revocation and the state’s stated reason, because a parent searching that name needs to know.
Some public records tend to come before a closure. When one of them is about a program, its page carries a short notice under one of two labels:
The label comes from what the record is about. Shortlist does not add records together, does not calculate anything about a program’s chances, and does not predict which programs will close. Most programs that close never carry a notice first.
Five kinds of record can lead to a notice:
Why 10 and 2 in 100: the chains Shortlist checked close about 1 location in 100 in a normal year. A location counts only when its page has left the company’s website on two checks in a row and a second record confirms the closure: the company’s own closed-center page, or the state’s license list. Shortlist tested this against company websites back to mid-2023, as saved by the Internet Archive. Counting confirmed closures, the line was crossed once, by KinderCare in October 2026, during the closure program it reported to investors. Counting every page that disappeared, without confirmation, it would also have been crossed by a chain of before- and after-school programs through two ordinary years, which is why every closure must be confirmed. The floor of 10 keeps a small chain’s ordinary turnover from counting.
Every notice names its source, links it, and gives the date Shortlist last read it. A notice whose source has not been checked again within 14 days comes down until it is. As of October 18, 2026, a state action notice can appear on 5,336 of the 12,657 programs Shortlist lists, all in the Chicago area, and 27 programs carry one. Illinois is the one state Shortlist reads each day that publishes these actions on its license list. Since October 15, 2026, Shortlist also reads Washington’s own record of each program, Child Care Check, and 5 Seattle-area programs carry a notice from it.
Company news appears only where the company’s own page for that address names the program, never on a name alone, and only on the kind of program the filing counts. As of October 18, 2026, it is on 185 KinderCare centers. KinderCare’s filing counts closures of its early childhood education centers; its Champions before- and after-school programs are a different kind of site, which the same filing says grew by 85 over the year, so Champions programs carry no notice. Shortlist reads the location lists of 16 company-run chains and the SEC filings of the 2 public companies among them, KinderCare and Bright Horizons; KinderCare is the one that meets either line today.
No notice is not an all-clear. It can mean nothing was found, or that Shortlist cannot check that kind of record for that program.
A wrong notice — the wrong company, the wrong address, or a record that has since changed — is Shortlist’s error. Reported through the corrections address below, the source is checked again within one business day, and the notice comes down if the record no longer supports it. A program that disputes the record itself takes that up with the state, court or company that published it.
A methodology is as much about how findings are framed as how they’re gathered. Shortlist holds to a few principles:
Shortlist presents each provider’s structural facts — ratios, group size, credentials, accreditation — as evidence for a parent to weigh, and leaves the judgment of fit to the family who tours. The research supports this: the von Suchodoletz et al. 2023 meta-analysis of 185 studies finds that the structural factors a public site can measure are only weak predictors of child outcomes, so Shortlist treats them as evidence rather than a single quality score. (A/B/C/D letter grades were part of the site through the first half of 2026 and were removed entirely, code included, on June 5, 2026 for this reason.)
Every provider is included on the same terms — operating in a covered area and meeting licensing requirements — and a city index is a plain list of every one of them, not a ranking. The same sources and the same standards apply to each, and placement is never for sale.
Every value comes from a real source: a state record, a provider’s own page, a job posting, a directory. When a field can’t be sourced, Shortlist leaves it blank and the record shows the gap. A blank means the research is still open — it is always a real value or nothing, never a modeled or predicted number standing in for one.
Shortlist uses first-party analytics to count page views and understand which features parents actually use. Visitor data stays first-party. See the privacy policy for details.
If something on the site looks wrong, email [email protected]. Corrections backed by a public source (a license record, a provider’s own website, an accreditation directory) move quickly. Providers can also claim their listing and submit edits through the provider dashboard; submissions go to a review queue and are reconciled against existing sources before being applied.
Last updated: October 18, 2026