How the Spotless Score works

What raises or lowers a score

The most recent result carries the most weight. A clean pass today matters more than anything in the past — it is what is true about the kitchen now.

Serious violations count; routine ones don’t. We weigh the violations public-health agencies treat as major risk factors for foodborne illness — things like improper food temperatures, handwashing failures, and pest activity. Administrative and housekeeping findings (a missing placard, a smudged shelf) do not move the score. Different cities publish these at very different levels of detail, and counting them would unfairly punish the cities that publish more.

Old problems fade. A serious violation from years ago weighs far less than one from last month. A restaurant that fixed its problems and has stayed clean recovers naturally over time.

Consistency matters. A restaurant that swings between passing and failing is treated as riskier than one with a single rough patch, even if the raw count of problems is the same.

What we deliberately leave out

We do not reward “improvement.” When a restaurant fails an inspection, many health departments require a re-inspection within a few days — which the restaurant usually passes. That bounce back to a passing grade is the enforcement process working, not evidence that the kitchen is now excellent. Counting it would mean rewarding the restaurants that had just failed. Instead, a recent failure keeps weighing on the score until enough time has passed for it to fade like any other old finding.

We do not count the sheer number of minor violations. A long list of small housekeeping notes is normal at a perfectly good restaurant, and some cities record far more of them than others. Only serious, health-relevant findings count.

When we don’t know enough

A single inspection, or one that happened years ago, isn’t strong evidence of a clean kitchen — it just isn’t much evidence at all. In those cases the score is pulled toward the middle rather than up, to reflect the uncertainty honestly. Some cities also don’t publish which violations were serious; where that’s true, we read severity from the inspector’s written notes, and we’re more cautious with the result.

See it for any restaurant

Open any restaurant in the app to see the specific reasons behind its score — the exact inspections and findings that shaped the number. And the score always sits next to the raw inspection record, so you can read the underlying data yourself and draw your own conclusion.

A caveat worth repeating

Inspection data can be out of date or wrong at the source, and a restaurant may have changed since its last inspection. The Spotless Score is a helpful summary, not a guarantee. If a decision really matters to you, check the health department’s own records. If you believe a score is wrong, tell us at hello@spotless.fyi.