A Score of 95 and a Grade of C: How Louisville Inspections Work

Every Louisville inspection produces two results, a number and a letter, and they do not move together. A restaurant can lose five points and be graded C. Another can lose twelve and keep its A. The number adds up everything the inspector marked. The letter turns on one kind of finding.

This site counts the letter. Across the food service establishments in Louisville Metro’s file, 5.0% of 19,067 regular inspections ended in a C. Most of those inspections still scored 85 or higher.

The number: 100, minus what was marked

The score is set by state rule, not by the city. Kentucky’s food establishment regulation says the inspection form “shall set forth a point value for each requirement,” and that “the rating score of the establishment shall be the total of the point value for all violations subtracted from 100.”

The score mostly decides how long a restaurant has to fix small things. “If the rating score of the establishment is eighty-five (85) or more, all violations of one (1) point items shall be corrected prior to the next routine inspection.” Between 70 and 84, the same items “shall be corrected within a period not to exceed thirty (30) days.” One-point items are the minor ones, and a restaurant can collect several and stay in the 90s.

The letter: one kind of finding decides it

The next line of the same rule is the one that matters for the grade: “Regardless of the rating score of the establishment, all violations of priority items shall be corrected within a time period not to exceed ten (10) days.” Priority items are, broadly, the ones tied most directly to people getting sick, such as food held at the wrong temperature or bare hands on ready-to-eat food. The phrase “regardless of the rating score” is the whole point. A kitchen that is spotless apart from one cooler running warm has a high score and a ten-day deadline.

In Louisville Metro’s records that deadline shows up as a C. We checked this against the department’s own files rather than assume it. The department publishes a separate list described as “violations recorded against permitted restaurants that failed inspection.” Every regular inspection graded C that this site counts appears in that list with a critical violation beside it. Almost no inspection graded A does. And on nearly every C the department’s file also records that a follow-up visit was needed.

One caution about our own sourcing. The page where the department explained its A, B and C placards in its own words is not reachable: it has returned an access error since at least early 2025. So this guide quotes the state rule and describes what the department’s data shows. If that page comes back, its wording takes priority over this reading.

What a C is not

It is not a closure, and the rule puts real distance between the two. A score under 70 brings “a Form DFS-214, Notice of Enforcement of intent to suspend the permit.” A permit is suspended on the spot, “without a hearing,” only in three cases: when there is “reason to believe that an imminent public health hazard exists,” when the permit holder “has interfered with the cabinet in the performance of its duties,” or when “an inspection of an establishment reveals a rating score of less than sixty (60).”

A restaurant that is made to stop serving also cannot simply reopen: it “shall not resume operations until a reinspection determines that conditions responsible for the requirement to cease operations no longer exist.” A C involves none of that. The restaurant stays open, fixes the problem, and is visited again.

How often inspectors come

The department’s published table of establishments carries a field for how often each one gets a routine inspection. For nearly every food service establishment it reads 180 days, so about twice a year. This site counts those regular inspections and leaves out the follow-up and complaint visits, which the department types separately. A follow-up visit exists because of an earlier finding, so counting it would count the same problem twice.

Reading the chain figures

13 chains have enough regular inspections to chart in Louisville. 3 sit clearly under the local rate, 9 are too close to call, and one, White Castle, sits clearly over it: 16 of 144 regular inspections ended in a C, a rate of 11.1% with a likely range of 7.0% to 17.3%. That figure sums up the chain’s Jefferson County locations over five years. It is not a statement about any one restaurant, and it says nothing about the chain anywhere else.

The large number of chains that are too close to call is a consequence of everything above. A C is uncommon, so a chain with a hundred-odd inspections has only a handful on file, and a handful cannot pin a rate down. A wide range that crosses the local rate does not mean a chain matches the local rate. It means these records cannot say.

Sources

• Kentucky Administrative Regulations, 902 KAR 45:005, sections 6 and 7 — how the score is calculated, the correction deadlines by score, the ten-day rule for priority items, and the grounds for suspending a permit.
• Louisville Metro Open Data, Inspection Violations of Failed Restaurants and the establishments table — the department’s own list of failed inspections, and the routine inspection interval it records for each establishment.
• Chain figures are computed from the same committed snapshot as the Louisville page; the method is on the methodology page.

Informational only. This is a reading of public inspection records, not food-safety, legal or dining advice, and no figure here is a grade of any individual restaurant. A figure describes what inspectors recorded across a set of visits in one place over one period — not a brand, and not the location near you.

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Against Kentucky's food establishment regulation, 902 KAR 45:005, and Louisville Metro's published inspection files.