What Are the Home Daycare License Requirements in California?

California licenses family child care homes through the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) Child Care Licensing Program, which provides oversight and enforcement through 21 regional offices.

Health and Safety Code 1596.78 defines a family daycare home as care for 14 or fewer children in the provider's own home, counting the provider's own children under age 10.

If you will care for children from more than one family in addition to your own, you are running a family daycare home, and CDSS licensing is the system those homes operate under.

Among the arrangements Health and Safety Code 1596.792 places outside licensing are a home caring for the children of only one family in addition to the operator's own children, and care provided by a relative.

The same statute also exempts cooperative parent arrangements where no payment is made — with no more than 12 children receiving care — and public recreation programs.

California issues two family child care home licenses.

A small family daycare home serves 8 or fewer children, and a large family daycare home serves 7 to 14 — both counts include the provider's own children under age 10 (Health and Safety Code 1596.78).

The top of each range carries conditions.

A small home may care for more than six and up to eight children without an additional adult attendant only if at least one child attends kindergarten or elementary school, a second child is at least 6 years old, no more than two infants are present, parents are notified, and the landlord consents when the property is rented (Health and Safety Code 1597.44).

A large home may serve 13 or 14 children only if at least one child is in kindergarten or elementary school, a second child is at least 6, and no more than three infants are present when more than 12 children are in care (Health and Safety Code 1597.465).

The Health and Safety Code sections this page draws on set a family daycare home's capacity and conditions; they do not state provider qualifications, and the CDSS pages our research could read did not confirm a minimum age, a pre-licensing training total, or annual training hours for family child care providers.

That is a gap in our research, not evidence that California has no provider requirements — the licensing agency's own materials are the authority on what a provider must show before opening.

Check current provider qualifications with the CDSS Child Care Licensing Program before you apply.

Two layers of checks apply to a California family child care home.

California requires staff of a child care facility to obtain a criminal record clearance or exemption from CDSS before employment or initial presence, with fingerprint images submitted to the California Department of Justice and to the FBI for a state- and federal-level criminal offender record information search (Health and Safety Code 1596.871).

Federal CCDF rules set the floor beneath that: every child care staff member of a licensed provider must have a comprehensive background check, and in a family child care home any household member age 18 or older counts as a child care staff member who needs it — which includes you as the provider and every other adult living in the home.

The federal check combines an FBI fingerprint check, a national sex offender registry search and, for the current state and every state lived in during the past 5 years, state criminal, sex offender and child abuse and neglect registry checks.

Checks are requested before the person becomes a staff member and repeated at least once every 5 years, and federal rules require states to complete a request within 45 days of submission.

The sources this page is built from establish who oversees licensed homes: the CDSS Child Care Licensing Program provides oversight and enforcement for licensed child care centers and family child care homes through its regional offices.

They do not set out the inspection itself — what CDSS reviews in a home before licensure or during later visits is not confirmed in our research, so this page does not list the safety features or paperwork an inspection covers.

CDSS's regional offices are the places to confirm what an inspection involves for a given home and license type.

Applying runs through CDSS's Child Care Licensing Program, and no local business license comes on top of the state license: family daycare homes are a residential use by right, so cities and counties may not require a zoning permit, business license, fee or tax to operate one, and renters can qualify (Health and Safety Code 1597.45, as amended by SB 234 effective January 1, 2020).

What our research could not confirm is the cost and the clock: the CDSS pages reviewed did not establish the current application fee, whether a licensing orientation applies to family child care homes, or how long the path from application to license takes, so this page quotes no dollar amount.

CDSS's website and its regional offices are the places to confirm current fees, any orientation requirement and processing times before you apply.

California's small-family-daycare capacity rules are written in terms of an additional adult attendant: Health and Safety Code 1597.44 lets a small home care for more than six and up to eight children without an additional adult attendant only when its conditions are met.

Anyone you employ as an assistant is a child care staff member: California requires a criminal record clearance or exemption from CDSS before employment or initial presence in the facility, and federal CCDF rules require a comprehensive background check requested before the person becomes a staff member.

The federal floor lets a new hire begin work once either the FBI fingerprint check or the in-state fingerprint criminal check returns a qualifying result, supervised at all times by a fully checked staff member until every component is complete; California's clearance-before-employment rule still applies, so confirm with CDSS whether an assistant may start before the clearance or exemption is issued.

The qualification and staffing rules CDSS sets for family child care home assistants were not confirmed in our research; the program's regional offices are the contact for what applies to your home.