Fast-food chains in Las Vegas and Clark County, by health district records

What stands out

No charted chain 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 charted chains 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 ends of this table are a long way apart. Pizza Hut is at 9.5% (5.7% to 15.3%, 148 inspections) and Popeyes at 45.3% (36.6% to 54.3%, 117). Their ranges do not come close to touching, and that is a comparison worth making: one jurisdiction, one rulebook, one set of inspectors. What it does not license is reading the crowd in the middle the same way — 2 of the 15 charted chains can be told apart from the chain in the middle of the table, and the rest cannot.

Starbucks carries the narrowest bar. 87 of 494 routine inspections, a rate of 17.6% between 14.5% and 21.2%. 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 39.1% (34.5% to 43.9%, 404 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 table and still be recording the finding less often than the restaurants around it. That is what a baseline 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.

Sample sizes and what they allow. 11 of the 15 charted chains have fewer than 200 routine inspections on file. Treat chains whose bars overlap as tied. Jersey Mike's (82) and KFC (81) are just short of the 100 we require and are listed unranked.

Analysis 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.”

How these figures are made

1. Source. SNHD restaurant and food establishment inspection database, published by the Southern Nevada Health District.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. The minimum. A chain needs 100 counted inspections to be charted. Below that it is listed with its count and no bar.
6. 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.
7. 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.

What this does not show

• Management quality on its own. Chains differ in what they handle. 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 describes 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.
• Every restaurant equally. Inspections are scheduled by risk and by past results, so a restaurant with problems is visited more often and appears 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 event under different rules. These figures only make sense next to other figures from Las Vegas and Clark County.

Informational only. These are public records, summarized; they are not a safety rating of any restaurant and not professional advice. Last reviewed: September 2026.