How your letter grade is actually calculated

Most owners we talk to know their letter. Far fewer know how it got there — and that gap costs people points, because you can't manage a number you don't understand.

So here's the whole thing, plainly.

It's a score, and lower is better

You don't get graded on a curve, and it isn't a percentage. Every violation carries points, the points add up, and the total lands you in a band:

• 0 to 13 — A
• 14 to 27 — B
• 28 and above — C

Yeah — it's golf. Low is good. If you've ever felt vaguely pleased about a high number, this is your moment.

Two kinds of violation

Critical violations are the ones tied to foodborne illness risk — temperature, contamination, pests. General violations are everything else: maintenance, facility, non-food-contact surfaces.

Critical items carry more points. Both count toward the same total.

The practical read: a report with two criticals and a report with six generals can land in very different places, so counting the number of violations tells you less than you'd think. Look at what kind they were.

The bit that catches everyone

Points aren't fixed per code.

The same violation code can be worth a different number of points depending on the condition the inspector observed. That's by design — the scoring parameters account for severity — but it means the mental model of "that code costs X" is just wrong.

We've watched an owner do the arithmetic on last year's report and get a number nowhere near what actually landed, then assume something went wrong. Nothing went wrong. The conditions were different.

How to actually read your history

Pull your record and look for three things, in this order:

1. Repeats. The same code appearing across multiple inspections is the single most useful signal you have. A one-off is noise. A repeat is a system telling you something, and it's usually a habit, a shift, or a piece of equipment.
2. Criticals vs generals. If your points are mostly critical, your problem is process. If they're mostly general, it's maintenance. Those are different budgets and different people.
3. The gap between inspection and re-inspection. What got fixed and what came back? Things that come back aren't fixed, they're patched.

What this changes about your week

Once you can read the score, the job stops being "pass the inspection" and becomes something much more manageable: know your repeats and kill them.

That's a shorter list than the entire health code. Usually it's three or four things. For most kitchens it's the same three or four things it's been for two years, which is either depressing or extremely actionable depending on your mood today.

We'd argue actionable. Three fixable things beats a hundred-page rulebook every time.

Want to see your own repeats without doing the spreadsheet? That's most of what we built Compliant Park to do — it reads the public record for your address and pulls out what keeps coming back.

But genuinely, either way: go look at your history. Even on paper. The pattern is usually sitting right there, and most people have never actually looked.

What's your repeat? We'd bet money it's temperature logs or the gap under a door.