Texas childcare licensing: ratios, training, inspections — the requirements in one place

By Del Peck · July 3, 2026

If you run a licensed child-care center in Texas, your rulebook has a name: 26 Texas Administrative Code, Chapter 746 — the Minimum Standards for Child-Care Centers. It’s enforced by Child Care Regulation (CCR), the division inside the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) that took over licensing from DFPS back in September 2017.

I read Chapter 746 cover to cover while building a childcare platform, so this post is the version I wish existed: the requirements that actually come up — ratios, training, inspections, records — with the section numbers, so you can verify anything here against the source. This isn’t legal advice; it’s a map. When in doubt, the standard itself wins.

(Disclosure: I’m the founder of TinyGuard, a childcare platform. The requirements below are the state’s, not ours — they’re true whether you track them on paper or in software.)

Ratios and group sizes (§746.1601 and §746.1609)

This is the one most directors have memorized, but here’s a detail worth pinning down: Texas sets both a caregiver-to-child ratio and a maximum group size. You’ll see it claimed online that “Texas doesn’t cap group size” — that’s wrong for a licensed center caring for 13 or more children. Section 746.1609 sets an explicit maximum for every age band.

The ratio is how many children one caregiver may supervise; the group size caps the room even when two or more caregivers are present. In a mixed-age room, the youngest child in the group sets the ratio. This is the single most-cited standard in an inspection, and the one that’s hardest to prove after the fact — more on that below.

Training and professional development (Subchapter D)

Texas layers several training requirements, and they’re easy to conflate:

• Orientation — for each employee within 7 days of hire, before they have unsupervised access to a child (§746.1303).
• Pre-service training — 24 clock hours for each non-exempt caregiver: 8 hours before they count in ratio, the remaining 16 within 90 days of employment (§746.1305; the two-years-prior-experience exemption is §746.1307).
• Annual training — 24 clock hours per year for each caregiver (§746.1309). It’s specific about the mix: at least 6 hours in areas like child growth and development or guidance and discipline, at least 1 hour on child-maltreatment prevention and reporting, and — for anyone caring for children under 24 months — an hour on shaken-baby/SIDS. At least 5 of the 24 hours must be instructor-led, and the 24 don’t include orientation, pre-service, or first-aid/CPR time.
• Directors carry a higher bar: 30 clock hours of annual training (§746.1311).
• Pediatric first aid and CPR — within 90 days, kept current (§746.1315).

The reason training trips people up at inspection isn’t the hours — most staff do the training — it’s the log. The inspector wants to see the clock hours documented per person, per training year.

Inspections: at least one unannounced visit a year (§745.8409)

CCR can inspect “as often as is necessary” (§745.8407), but the floor is set in §745.8409: at least one unannounced inspection every year for a licensed operation. Unannounced is the operative word — there’s no letter warning you it’s tomorrow, so the only workable strategy is to be inspection-ready as a steady state rather than a fire drill.

When the inspector arrives, the visit is mostly documentation. They work down their own checklist: staff records and background checks, child records and immunizations, incident/illness reports, ratio compliance, drill logs, and your written policies. Very little of an inspection is spent watching the classroom; most of it is spent reading your files.

Records — and how long to keep them (Subchapter C)

The retention rules are less famous than the ratios but just as real:

• General rule (§746.803): keep each required record at least 3 months from when it was created, unless a specific rule says longer.
• Training records (§746.907): keep for the current and last full training year.
• Incident/Illness reports (§746.709): keep with the child’s record and for at least 3 months after the child’s last day in care.
• Personnel records (§746.907): keep at least 3 months after an employee’s last day.
• Child records (§746.603): the full enrollment picture per child — admission info, health statement, immunizations, incident reports, sign-in/out, medication records.

Immunizations (§746.613): every enrolled child, birth through 14, must meet the DSHS immunization schedule, and you must keep a current record on file — including documentation of any exemption. Texas allows exemptions for a medical reason or for reason of conscience, including religious belief, under DSHS rule 25 TAC §97.62.

Background checks (Chapter 745, Subchapter F)

Every employee, and generally anyone with regular access to children, needs a background check before unsupervised contact: a fingerprint-based criminal history check searching both the Texas DPS and FBI databases, a DFPS Central Registry check against the state’s abuse/neglect records, and a National Sex Offender Registry check. Renewals aren’t one-and-done — a fingerprint-based check is renewed at least every 5 years (name-based checks, where allowed for lower-risk roles, every 2 years), plus any time someone changes their state of residence or moves into a role that requires fingerprinting.

The pattern behind all of it

Read the list back and you’ll notice the requirements sort into two piles. One pile is have the thing: a signed enrollment form, a current immunization record, a background check on file. Most centers have those; when they’re missing it’s usually a genuine gap, and the fix is to go get the document.

The other pile is prove it happened over time: that you met ratio in the toddler room every day for the last year, that fire drills ran monthly, that each caregiver logged their 24 hours. This is the pile that eats a director’s week before an inspection — not because the center did anything wrong, but because reconstructing twelve months of ratio from a stack of sign-in sheets is genuinely hours of work.

That’s the real lesson in Chapter 746: the expensive records are the ones that have to accumulate continuously. If ratio compliance only exists as paper sign-in sheets, you rebuild it by hand every year. If it accumulates automatically as children check in and out, the “prove it” pile stops being a project.

Where TinyGuard fits (briefly)

(I’ll keep this short — I don’t want a rulebook explainer to turn into a pitch.) The reason I built TinyGuard around this is exactly the “prove it over time” pile. Check-ins compute a ratio record as they happen; incident reports are auto-numbered and parent-signed; drill logs and staff/child records live in their own modules. When an inspection comes, the center pulls a single Licensing Compliance Packet PDF instead of rebuilding a year of logs from sign-in sheets. Same standard, same documentation — it just accumulated as you went, so it’s already there.

We’re pre-launch and honest about it — no paying-customer testimonial to show you yet — but the export is real and built. Founding partners keep their locked rate for as long as they’re in the program; the numbers are all on the pricing page, no demo required to see them. If you’d rather just get ready for your next visit, the printable inspection checklist works on paper too.

The short version

Texas childcare licensing isn’t mysterious — Chapter 746 spells it out, section by section. The ratios and group sizes are fixed (and yes, group size is capped). The training is 24 hours a year per caregiver, 30 for directors, documented per training year. Inspections are annual and unannounced, and mostly about your records. Keep the “have the thing” documents current, and make the “prove it over time” records accumulate on their own — and an unannounced visit stops being a reason to lose a week.

— Del Peck Founder, TinyGuard

Every figure above is drawn from the HHSC Minimum Standards for Child-Care Centers (26 TAC Chapter 746) and the related licensing rules in Chapter 745. Standards are revised periodically — confirm current numbers against the official HHSC Chapter 746 document or your regional Child Care Regulation office before relying on them.

Running a center in another state? Same breakdown for California and Minnesota, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, and Massachusetts.

TinyGuard puts cameras, care logging, billing, and compliance on one on-site box. Book a 15-minute demo or see the pricing.