How Shortlist sources its data
Shortlist is a research publication. Every data point on the site — tuition, ratios, schedules, accreditations, teacher pay — traces back to a public source or a provider’s own statement. This page documents what gets included, where each field comes from, how often it’s refreshed, and the standards behind every value.
The same sources, the same standards, applied equally to every provider — and the parent, not a payment, decides how the ledger is ordered.
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, Denver, Kansas City, Charlotte, Austin, and the Bay Area. In-home nannies, individual caregivers, and unlicensed care fall outside that scope. When a provider closes — confirmed by DNS, licensing status, or its own website — the listing is retired from the ledger.
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.
National chains have brand-level policies that apply across all locations. One verified fact — e.g., “all KinderCare locations provide meals” — fills dozens of provider records. Chain-level data is recorded with a chain-level source note so parents can see how it was inferred.
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.
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, in priority order. The first source listed is the one that fills most records; later sources backfill gaps.
| Field | Primary source |
|---|---|
| License status, license number, capacity | State licensing database |
| Inspection history | State licensing database |
| State quality rating | State QRIS (Early Achievers, Colorado Shines, NC Star, Texas Rising Star, ExceleRate) |
| Year established | State licensing date → ProPublica 990 ruling date → provider website → Wayback Machine first crawl |
| Accreditation (NAEYC, Montessori, Waldorf, NAIS, ISACS, Cognia) | Accrediting body directory; provider website is a claim, never a verification |
| Tuition (price low / price high) | Provider tuition page; state-published rates if available |
| Age range | Provider programs page |
| Schedule (hours per day, days per week) | Provider programs or enrollment page; both numeric values required |
| Meals | Parent handbook → FAQ → chain-level inference (Head Start, KinderCare, Bright Horizons, etc.) |
| Ratio (children per teacher) | Parent handbook or staff page, explicit only; state licensing minimums for some states |
| Enrollment status | Provider enrollment page, with a date stamp on every update |
| Teaching philosophy | Provider about or philosophy page, explicit statements only |
| Teacher pay | Indeed listings, provider careers pages, or IRS Form 990 filings — only real postings with explicit dollar amounts |
| Staff tenure | Named teacher bios with specific years of experience — never inferred from “experienced staff” |
| Location (latitude, longitude) | Geocoded from the licensed address |
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.
For Seattle providers, Shortlist publishes the public inspection and complaint record kept by Washington’s Department of Children, Youth & Families (DCYF). This is the highest-stakes information on the site, so it is shown in full: every complaint case and every routine monitoring finding on file appears on the provider’s listing, each linked to its DCYF source document so a parent can read the original.
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.
Washington publishes these records only as per-provider PDF documents, with no bulk data feed, so Shortlist scans each licensed Seattle provider’s DCYF portal record on a recurring schedule and re-reads the underlying documents whenever a provider’s record changes. A newly filed complaint is the highest-priority output of that scan.
Inspection and complaint records are currently available for Seattle — the one metro with a state-linked inspection feed today. The same treatment extends to other cities as their state records become linkable. If a record looks wrong, email [email protected]; findings are corrected against the DCYF source, never quietly removed on request.
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. A weekly data run refreshes them on a per-field cadence rather than a uniform site-wide schedule; the target interval for each field is below.
| Field | Refresh interval |
|---|---|
| Enrollment status | 90 days — every record carries a date; status older than 90 days is treated as unknown |
| Pricing | 365 days — annual review |
| Licensing & inspection | Weekly for Seattle — each run re-scans WA licensing status and the DCYF inspection/complaint portal, re-pulling changed records; other metros refresh on periodic manual state pulls |
| Teacher pay | 180 days — pay bands shift slowly; refreshed semi-annually from current postings |
| Accreditation | 365 days, with directory caches refreshed weekly |
| Closure detection | Every weekly run — state licensing status is re-checked, and a provider marked inactive is retired from the ledger; website reachability is checked separately |
| Other fields | Refreshed opportunistically during enrichment runs and when providers self-submit updates |
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.
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 early 2026 and were retired in April 2026 for this reason.)
Every provider is included on the same terms — operating in a covered area and meeting licensing requirements — and the ledger is ordered by the parent’s own filters, not by any provider’s standing with Shortlist. The same sources and the same standards apply to each one, 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.
Written reviews appear only where Shortlist has done the work — read the website, verified accreditation, reviewed inspections, checked job postings, and where possible talked to families. Most listings carry no review and let the data ledger speak for the program.
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: July 2, 2026