How NYC restaurant grades and points work

New York City has required restaurants to post a letter grade since 2010. The letter stands for the score of a sanitary inspection: 0 to 13 points is an A, 14 to 27 points is a B, and 28 or more points is a C. The card must be posted where people passing by can easily see it. The Health Department also states that a restaurant is not fined for sanitary violations found at an inspection that results in an A.

A restaurant has two chances to earn an A in each inspection cycle. Two kinds of inspection end in a letter:

• an initial inspection on which the restaurant scores in the A range, and
• a re-inspection, which ends in an A, a B or a C.

If the initial inspection scores 14 points or more, it is scored and not graded. An inspector comes back unannounced — no sooner than 7 days later — and that re-inspection is the graded one. When a re-inspection ends in a B or a C, the restaurant receives the grade card and a Grade Pending card, and may post either until it has had the chance to be heard at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Until a restaurant has a graded inspection, the department lists it as Not Yet Graded.

Inspections that are scored and not graded

• initial inspections that score 14 points or more;
• monitoring inspections at a restaurant that did very poorly on its re-inspection, which the department may repeat roughly monthly until the score is below 28 or it closes the restaurant;
• inspections at new restaurants that are not yet open to the public;
• an inspection at a restaurant seeking to reopen after the department closed it;
• some inspections made in response to complaints;
• inspections before 27 July 2010.

How soon the next cycle starts

The score also sets the date of the next initial inspection. The length of time is based on the higher of the initial and the re-inspection score.

• It can change. A restaurant may argue its case at a hearing, and the department’s notes say the whole process can take several months. The score in the data is the revised one where a hearing has happened and the original one where it has not.
• Score and letter can disagree. The notes warn that scores of 0 to 13, 14 to 27 and 28 or more are not always accompanied by an A, a B and a C in the data, because of limits or errors in the data systems.
• It cannot say which card is posted when a re-inspection ended in a B or a C before a hearing: the grade card or the Grade Pending card.
• A reopening inspection’s own score does not set the grade. The grade shown on it comes from the inspection before the closure.
• There is a gap in the record. Letter grading inspections were paused from 17 March 2020 until 19 July 2021 because of the COVID-19 public health emergency; modified inspections took place in that time.
• It is not a history. The dataset keeps up to three years of inspections for restaurants that are open now. The department says it is not suited to comparing past years with the present.

The department inspects restaurants unannounced at least once a year. For the grade a restaurant holds today, ABCEats, the city’s own lookup, is the authority. To see how the letters are spread across the city, read restaurant grades by borough.