Your Inspection Report

What Salt Lake County Inspectors Actually Cite for Pests

Written for: Restaurant owners and managers on the Wasatch Front, kitchen managers, multi-unit operators

Parts of this page marked Professional synthesis, not law are a Board Certified Entomologist's reading of published records. They are not legal rules, they are not legal advice, and they are written to read the same for an owner, a customer, or either side's counsel.

If you just had an inspection with a pest line on it, you are in a large group. This page measures that group. It is built from the county’s own public records, read line by line and reported only in totals, with a snapshot date of November 2, 2026. No restaurant is named here, and the method that keeps it that way is on the methodology page.

How common a pest line is

In the two years ending November 2, 2026, the county posted 8,378 routine inspections of 4,351 food establishments. 1,312 of those inspections, 15.7 percent, carried at least one line that named a pest, a pest product, an insect control device, or an opening or harborage condition.

That is about one routine inspection in six. By type of business:

Categories with fewer than 10 inspections are not shown; a pest-line count under 10 is printed as <10 with no share. A plated restaurant, with a full kitchen, more doors, more deliveries and more drains, draws a pest line more often than a cart. That is the building, not the people.

Most pest lines are about openings, not infestations

Read by what the inspector wrote, the pest-related lines sort into four kinds. The numbers are inspections (an inspection can carry more than one line).

Two things stand out. Seven in ten pest-related inspections included a condition line, a door that does not seal or a hole where a pipe comes through a wall (some of those inspections also carried an activity or pesticide line), and almost none of the condition lines was critical. And when a line was critical, it was almost always one of two things: a pest the inspector saw, or a pesticide the inspector found. Nearly every store-bought-spray line is critical. That is the single most avoidable critical pest citation in the county.

The county’s own labels

Each line on a county report carries a label the county calls the PHR. These are the labels that carried pest-related lines in the window, with the county’s code number:

The asterisks are the county’s. The county says critical items are marked on the report with an asterisk; in the regulation itself they carry the Roman numerals I (Critical 1) and II (Critical 2), and the county’s public pages do not say what one asterisk versus two means. In this data, labels with either mark were critical on nearly every report that carried them. “Outer Openings-Protected” alone accounts for more than half of all pest-related inspections. What each label requires, in the Food Code’s own words, is on the authorities pages; what it means on your report, and what fixes it, is in the Decoder.

What inspectors write, in their own wording

The labels tell you the rule. The inspector’s observation tells you what they saw. Grouped by what the observation said:

A line can fall in more than one group, and groups with fewer than 10 inspections are not shown.

What this means for a manager

Professional synthesis, not law. Three readings of these numbers, from an entomologist who has stood in a lot of back doorways:

1. The back door is the whole game for most kitchens. Door gaps, propped doors and missing screens together are the largest block of pest-related lines in the county, and almost none of them is critical. They are also the cheapest to fix: a door sweep, a self-closer, a screen, and a rule about the delivery door. The Exclusion Walk is built around exactly these lines.
2. Dead pests count. “Removing Dead or Trapped” lines appear in about 103 inspections in two years. Many of those kitchens had a working pest program; the bait was doing its job, and the cadavers were the citation. That has its own page: Dead pests are their own line.
3. The can of spray under the sink is the citation you can erase today. Store-bought pesticide lines are critical almost every time. The Food Code restricts what poisonous or toxic materials may be in a food establishment and how they may be used, and a home-use aerosol in a kitchen is cited under those rules. Take it out, and put the question of who may apply what to a licensed professional. Why the rule exists, and who may treat a kitchen in Utah, is on Who may apply pesticide in a Utah kitchen.

These counts describe the county as a whole. They say nothing about any one restaurant, and they are not a prediction about yours.