Your Reputation

How Inspection Results Become Public in Utah, and Who Copies Them

Written for: Restaurant owners and managers on the Wasatch Front; multi-unit operators; anyone who just searched their own restaurant's name

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.

A pest line on a report is one thing. The same line on a public website, copied by a review platform and read by a customer deciding where to eat, is the thing managers actually worry about. This page sets out what is public in each Wasatch Front county, in the counties’ own words, and what the county itself says about the copies.

Salt Lake County: everything, the next business day

The county’s inspection site describes its own scope:

This web site includes food establishment inspections, ranking information, the number of critical violations and non-critical violations, details of violations and current closures. You will also find useful links at the top of the search page. Regardless of the rating if a food establishment is open, it met acceptable health department requirements at the time of the last inspection. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Public Health Inspections site, Welcome page

Inspections in the database began to be entered on January 1, 2008. It will take two to four years to compile a full history of an establishment. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Public Health Inspections site, Welcome page

So for any permitted establishment in the county, a customer can read the score, the rank, the count of critical and non-critical violations, and every violation line in the inspector’s own words, for every routine, follow-up and critical-item inspection since 2008. The county adds new inspections every business day and recalculates ranks on Friday evenings (how to read the report).

Read the second half of that first quotation again, because it is the sentence a manager can point to: “Regardless of the rating if a food establishment is open, it met acceptable health department requirements at the time of the last inspection.” The county says it. An open restaurant passed.

What is not online

Many inspections, complaints, and foodborne illness investigations are not available on this website, but may be viewed at our office. The inspection types, not available, include: construction inspections, pre-opening inspections, foodborne illness investigations, and complaint response. To view these items a GRAMA request must be filed with the Salt Lake County Health Department’s Environmental Health Division. Request forms and instructions are here. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Public Health Inspections site, Inspection types

A customer’s complaint about a pest, and the county’s investigation of it, are therefore not on the public site. They are public records reachable by request, and the owner has the same right to the file (the county regulation). The county invites complaints directly:

The Salt Lake County Health Department relies on you to notify health officials of any problems you observe in the community. We can’t do anything about a problem we don’t know about. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Report a Food Service Problem

The copies: what the county says about review sites

This is the part no other reference states plainly, and it comes from the county itself:

The only official source for Salt Lake County Health Department inspection information is the ”Inspection Reports” button on this website. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Inspection Reports page, read Nov. 3, 2026

Private entities, including review websites and media outlets, sometimes pull data from our website and create their own inspection summary, score, or ranking, but the summaries or scores available from these entities do not update daily and may not be an accurate representation of a Salt Lake County Health Department inspection. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Inspection Reports page, read Nov. 3, 2026

This site does not say which platforms display Utah inspection data, because no platform’s own published documentation for Utah was verified on the verification date; that is an open item. What can be said is what the county says: copies exist, they are not official, they may be stale, and the county’s own site is the record. A manager who finds an old score on a third-party page has the county’s words to answer it with.

The county also explains why it does not use a letter grade, and the explanation is useful to a manager answering a customer:

Our Food Protection Bureau has received national recognition for its risk-based scoring system and real-time rankings, which are more thorough and transparent to the public than a simple letter grade or score. Our system encourages consumers to evaluate an establishment’s full inspection history for consistent good or bad practices, rather than relying on a grade or score that reflects just one inspection—a snapshot in time—of an establishment’s operation that is outdated the day after it’s posted. — Salt Lake County Health Department, Inspection Reports page, read Nov. 3, 2026

The other counties

Each Wasatch Front health department does something different, and this site states only what it found on the verification date:

• Davis County publishes restaurant inspections online through a public portal, with violations, results and inspector comments, with records since 2006; no score is stated.
• Weber-Morgan publishes inspections online with critical and non-critical violations; no score is stated.
• Tooele County publishes inspections online with violation counts, details and dates, since July 2013; no score is stated.
• Utah County links from its Environmental Health page to a “Restaurant Inspection Reports” lookup on a third-party service. That lookup refused the automated check this site uses, so what it shows, and whether it holds any reports, is not verified here. Utah County’s 2026 enforcement regulation contains no public-posting provision (Utah County Regulation 26-01).
• Summit and Wasatch counties: no online inspection lookup was found.

None of the other counties publishes a bulk download, and none is included in the aggregate findings on this site.

What a manager can do about the record

Professional synthesis, not law. You cannot remove a line from a county report, and this site will not suggest trying. What you can do:

1. Clear it at the next inspection. The public record is a history, and the county says so. A pest line followed by a clean follow-up and a clean routine inspection is a history that reads as a problem fixed. Two in three kitchens clear a pest line by the next visit (what comes back).
2. Keep the correction record. When a customer, a landlord, a franchisor or a reporter asks about a line, the dated corrective-action entry and the service report are the answer (Records Binder).
3. Answer calmly and specifically. “The inspector found a gap under our back door in March; we installed a new sweep and closer that week, and the follow-up was clean” is a sentence that ends a conversation. “That report is wrong” is not. The first-hour page covers the version of this that happens at the table.
4. Know what the county says. If a review site shows an old score, the county’s own page says such copies “do not update daily and may not be an accurate representation.” Point to the official site.