Fast food chains in Las Vegas and Clark County, by health district records
See how often routine inspections by the Southern Nevada Health District recorded a 5-demerit violation at each fast food chain’s restaurants in Clark County, next to the rate for every restaurant in the county. Five demerits is the district’s most serious class of violation.
Covers: All of Clark County, including Henderson, North Las Vegas, Mesquite, Laughlin and the Strip, which the health district inspects as one jurisdiction.
The short answer
13 of the 15 chains came in under the local rate.
- 13under the local rate
- 2too close to call
- 0over the local rate
The local rate is the tall line in the chart below. Across all restaurants in Las Vegas and Clark County, 44.8% of routine inspections recorded at least one 5-demerit violation, the district's most serious class.
Chain by chain
Each bar is the range a chain’s real rate probably falls in: the fewer inspections, the wider the bar. The short tick is the rate we measured. Bars that overlap are too close to call, so rows run from the lowest measured rate to the highest for reading only.
- Under the local rate
- Too close to call
- Over the local rate
Why the chains are not numbered first to last. The lowest rate on file is Pizza Hut at 9.5% and the highest is Popeyes at 44.9%. Those two really are apart: their ranges do not touch. But only 2 of the 15 chains can be told apart from the chain in the middle of the list. The rest are too close to it to call.
16 more chains with too few inspections to chart
A chain needs 100 routine inspections on file here before it gets a bar. These have fewer: Jersey Mike's (83), KFC (82), Jimmy John's (65), Raising Cane's (64), Papa John's (62), Dairy Queen (61), Sonic (60), Arby's (53), Chick-fil-A (52), Panera (49), Firehouse Subs (47), Five Guys (26), Shake Shack (21), White Castle (14), Whataburger (6), Zaxby's (4).
What stands out
No chain on the chart sits clearly above the county rate. 44.8% of routine inspections of Clark County restaurants recorded at least one 5-demerit violation, and not one of the 15 chains on the chart has a range sitting wholly above that. Read every bar against the 44.8% rule rather than against the other bars: a chain at 35% here is not a chain in trouble, it is a chain recording the finding less often than Clark County restaurants usually do.
The two ends of this chart are a long way apart. Pizza Hut is at 9.5% (5.7% to 15.3%, 148 inspections) and Popeyes at 44.9% (36.2% to 53.9%, 118). Their ranges do not come close to touching, and that is a comparison worth making: one jurisdiction, one rulebook, one set of inspectors. It does not mean the crowd in the middle can be read the same way — 2 of the 15 chains on the chart can be told apart from the chain in the middle of the chart, and the rest cannot.
Starbucks carries the narrowest bar. 89 of 502 routine inspections, a rate of 17.7% between 14.6% and 21.3%. Part of that low figure is the menu rather than the management: 5-demerit violations are mostly about holding, cooling and hand contact, and a coffee counter does less of all three than a kitchen cooking to order.
Subway is the instructive one. At 39.8% (35.1% to 44.6%, 410 inspections) it is close to the county rate and well above most chains here, yet its range still ends below 44.8%. A chain can be near the top of this chart and still be recording the finding less often than the restaurants around it. That is what the local rate is for.
Little Caesars and Popeyes are level with the county. Their ranges include the 44.8% rate, so we cannot say they record a 5-demerit violation more or less often than an ordinary Clark County restaurant.
The county rate mixes four risk categories. The health district assigns every permit a risk category from 1 to 4 “based off the complexity of food preparation processes and the population served,” and says inspection frequency depends on that category and on compliance history. The 44.8% figure is all four together. A chain that sits in one of them is being set against a rate drawn from all of them — one more reason to read these bars as records rather than as a verdict on how a chain is run.
How much the smaller chains can tell us. 10 of the 15 chains on the chart have fewer than 200 routine inspections on file. Treat chains whose bars overlap as tied. Jersey Mike's (83) and KFC (82) are just short of the 100 it takes to draw a bar and are listed without a bar.
Written September 2026. The figures in it are read from the current records, so they move when the records do.
How inspections work in Las Vegas and Clark County
Restaurants in Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Mesquite, Laughlin and the rest of Clark County are inspected by one agency, the Southern Nevada Health District, which says it “conducts unannounced inspections of food establishments at least once a year.” How much more often than that depends on the establishment: the district says frequency “will depend on the compliance history of the establishment as well as the risk category assigned to the permit.”
Inspections are scored in demerits. The district’s published violation list assigns each violation 1, 3 or 5 demerits, and the 5-demerit entries are the food-safety basics: holding food at proper temperatures, handwashing and bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, food from an approved source, and backflow and cross-connection hazards. This page counts whether a routine inspection recorded at least one 5-demerit violation, and nothing else about it — not the total, not the grade.
Demerits add up to a grade. In the district’s words, findings “may result in an ‘A’ grade, a downgrade to a ‘B’ or ‘C’ grade, or for an extremely excessive number of violations or an uncontrolled imminent health hazard, a closure of the facility may result.” Most inspections counted on this page still ended in an A, so read the bars as a count of findings, not as a count of bad restaurants.
The district is plain about what one inspection is worth, and it applies to every figure here: “An inspection conducted on any given day may not be representative of the overall, long-term cleanliness of an establishment,” and “the conditions and violations documented during a food establishment inspection may have been corrected since the last date of inspection.”
What this can’t tell you
- Who runs the better kitchen. Chains handle different food. A coffee counter deals with far less raw food than a kitchen that fries chicken, so part of any gap between chains is the menu.
- Anything about one restaurant. A figure sums up that chain’s locations in Las Vegas and Clark County over this period. It is not a statement about the brand elsewhere and not a warning about the one near you.
- Whether every restaurant got equal attention. Inspections are scheduled by risk and by past results, so a restaurant with problems is visited more often and shows up more often in these counts. That holds for chains and for all restaurants alike.
- How Las Vegas and Clark County compares with anywhere else. Each place counts a different thing under different rules. These figures only make sense next to other figures from Las Vegas and Clark County.
How we counted
- Source. SNHD restaurant and food establishment inspection database, published by the Southern Nevada Health District. Pulled October 2, 2026.
- What counts. Only routine inspections of establishments permitted as restaurants; re-inspections, complaint investigations and permitting visits are left out, as are bars, snack bars, buffets, school and institutional kitchens. Inspectors go back to restaurants that already had a problem, so counting return visits would stack the numbers.
- The figure. For each chain, the number of those inspections that recorded at least one 5-demerit violation, the district's most serious class, divided by all of them. “All restaurants” is the same sum over everything in the file, chains included.
- The range. A 95% Wilson score interval. If we could rerun the same period many times, the true rate would land inside a range built this way about 19 times in 20. Fewer inspections means a wider range.
- The minimum. A chain needs 100 counted inspections to be charted. Below that it is listed with its count and no bar.
- Matching names to chains. Restaurant names are matched to chains with a published table of name patterns (version 2026-09-20.4). A location recorded under two chain names, such as a combined KFC and Taco Bell, is counted for neither. If a match is wrong, write to hello@fastfoodfact.com and it will be corrected.
- Reuse. Published for reuse: the health district offers the whole database as a nightly download from a page addressed to developers. Its disclaimer is a liability notice only, with no restriction on reuse and no attribution requirement.
The full method, including the formula for the range, is on the methodology page.
Inspection frequency, risk categories, grades and closure: SNHD, Food Establishment Operations and its Restaurant Inspection Search. The demerit values are the district’s own, read from the violation table in the database it publishes for developers. We count inspections typed Routine Inspection at establishments whose permit maps to the district’s Restaurant category; re-inspections, complaint investigations and permitting visits are separate types and are left out, as are bars, snack bars, buffets, portable units, and school and institutional kitchens. A chain needs 100 inspections to be charted.
Informational only. These are public records, summarized; they are not a safety rating of any restaurant and not professional advice. Last reviewed: September 2026.
Quote or download these figures
You may quote any figure on this page. Please credit FastFoodFact with a link, keep the count and the range with the rate, and don’t set a figure from one place against a figure from another: each place counts a different thing.
FastFoodFact, "Fast food chains in Las Vegas and Clark County." Counted from SNHD restaurant and food establishment inspection database, Southern Nevada Health District; routine inspections September 1, 2023 to October 1, 2026, pulled October 2, 2026. https://www.fastfoodfact.com/las-vegas
The counts as a file: CSV or JSON. Each file covers one place and names its source.
Frequently asked questions
What is a 5-demerit violation in Clark County?
The Southern Nevada Health District scores each violation on its inspection report at 1, 3 or 5 demerits, and 5 is the most serious class. Its published violation list puts the food-safety basics there: holding food at proper temperatures, handwashing and bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, food from an approved source, and backflow or cross-connection hazards. This page counts whether a routine inspection recorded at least one of them, not how many it recorded.
Does a 5-demerit violation mean the restaurant was closed or downgraded?
No. The health district says inspection findings "may result in an 'A' grade, a downgrade to a 'B' or 'C' grade, or for an extremely excessive number of violations or an uncontrolled imminent health hazard, a closure of the facility may result." A single 5-demerit violation is a long way short of either. Most inspections that record one still end in an A.
How often do routine Las Vegas inspections record a 5-demerit violation?
In these records, 44.8% of 25,461 routine inspections of establishments permitted as restaurants recorded at least one. That is the rate every chain on this page is compared with. It is an ordinary result in Clark County, not a rare one. It cannot be read against another place's figure: a 5-demerit violation is not the same event as a Florida high-priority violation or a Chicago Fail.
Which fast food chain has the fewest 5-demerit violations in Las Vegas?
The lowest rate on file is Pizza Hut: 14 of its 148 routine inspections recorded one, a rate of 9.5% with a likely range of 5.7% to 15.3%. Other chains have ranges that overlap it, so this site does not number them first to last. The figure describes that chain's Clark County locations over this period, not any single restaurant.
The guide to these records
- How Las Vegas Demerits Turn Into the Grade on the Door
Clark County inspectors assess demerits, and the total sets the grade card: A, B, C or closure. What earns five demerits, what the imminent health hazards are, and how that maps onto the figures here.
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