About this directory

Who publishes it

This is a small, independent publication. It is edited by Vadym Starynets, who is responsible for the editorial decisions on it, including which registers are used, how license status is computed and what the site declines to claim. Corrections and questions go through the contact page and are answered by a person.

It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any government agency, any trade body, or any of the businesses listed.

Where the listings come from

Every listing is drawn from a government register of licensed or certified providers. Nothing is scraped from another directory and nothing is submitted by the businesses themselves. The registers currently in use are listed below with the publishing authority and the dataset identifier, so any record here can be traced back to its source.

Geocoding is done through the US Census Bureau geocoder, which is a free public service. Where a register already publishes a coordinate, that one is used and no lookup is made.

What we do that the registers do not

This is the whole justification for the site existing, so it is worth being specific.

• Live versus lapsed. The registers mix current and expired licenses in one list. One state's own metadata says facilities whose license expired less than six years ago are still included. Every card here is labelled, computed from the expiry date the register publishes.
• One business, not one license. A register row is a license. The same address often holds several, and in the current data 91% of inspection facilities hold more than one class. Records are merged per facility, so one shop is one listing.
• County resolved from the address. Counties are determined by locating the address inside the official county boundary rather than trusting the register's own county column, which is wrong on a small number of rows.
• Normalised addresses and phone formats, so a search for a street or a town finds what it should.
• Search, filters and nearest-to-me, which none of the source registers offers in any usable form.
• A last-checked date on every record. Freshness is part of what makes a directory worth more than the file it came from.

What we deliberately do not claim

A directory that implies more certainty than it has is worse than one that states its limits.

• No license dates are invented. One register publishes no license dates at all. For those records the only statement made is that the facility appeared in the state register as of its refresh date. No expiry is shown, inferred or estimated.
• No distance claims in page text. Distances appear only in the "nearest to me" list, computed in your own browser from your own location, and they are straight-line rather than driving distances. Written distance claims derived from register coordinates proved unreliable on an earlier project and are not made here.
• No guessed map positions. Addresses that are PO boxes, bare route numbers or road junctions cannot be geocoded. Those facilities are listed and searchable by name, city and county, and left off the map, rather than being dropped or placed somewhere plausible.
• No capability labels the register does not support. Where a register states diesel capability, it is shown. Where a register has no such column, no claim is made either way, rather than inferring it from a business name.
• No claim to be the official register. For a definitive answer on any individual license, check with the issuing authority.

Where the regulatory pages come from

The reference pages are written against the primary text, retrieved from the electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Every factual statement about a regulation names the section it comes from, in the sentence that makes the claim, and each page carries a source note listing the sections used and the currency date of the text.

Federal regulations and federal agency publications are works of the United States government and are in the public domain. Nothing on these pages is taken from another publisher's article. They are not legal advice: they are an organised reading of the rule, with the citations attached so you can check them.

Money

The site is funded by display advertising, marked as advertising wherever it appears. No business pays to be listed, no business pays for position, and no listing is removed on request from the business unless the underlying register record has changed. If a listing is wrong, the fix is to correct it, not to delete it.