The new restaurant A
When a restaurant opens, the city inspects it once, and if that goes well, it gets an A. We looked at what happens between that first A and the next inspection.
How a new restaurant gets its first grade
A new restaurant in New York can open 22 days after it applies for its permit, without waiting for an inspection. The Health Department then makes an unannounced pre-permit inspection after the doors open. It is scored like any other: 13 points or fewer earns an A, which goes straight into the window.
If the restaurant scores 14 or more, it is re-inspected, the same as any established restaurant, and that second score sets the grade.
After an A, the city aims to inspect again in about a year.
How many A grades come from a pre-permit inspection
Of the 22,307 restaurants whose most recent letter grade is an A, 3,278 got that A at their pre-permit inspection. That is about one A in seven on New York's windows.
| How the pre-permit A was earned | Restaurants |
|---|---|
| At the first pre-permit inspection | 2,440 |
| At the re-inspection, after failing the first | 838 |
Most of them, 2,801, have not been inspected again since. The other 477 have been inspected since without a new grade being issued, and for 424 of those, a later routine inspection scored 14 or more. For those, the first A is still in the window because a failed inspection issues no new grade, which is the subject of The year-long A.
How long until the next inspection
The city aims for about a year. Measured across every new restaurant that has since had its first routine inspection, the median wait was 509 days, almost 17 months, and 93.4% waited longer than a year. More than one in five waited 600 days or longer, about 20 months.
New restaurants are not being singled out. After an A from a routine inspection, established restaurants wait a median of 16.3 months, and 90.0% wait longer than a year. The typical wait runs more than four months past what the city aims for.
These waits are underestimates. A wait can only be measured once the next inspection has happened, so restaurants that are still waiting are not counted, and they are the ones waiting longest.
What the first routine inspection finds
For each kind of history, here is the share of restaurants that failed their next routine inspection.
- Two A grades in a row from routine inspections 18.4% 7.3% in the C range
- One A from a routine inspection 29.1% 11.8% in the C range
- New restaurant, A on the first try 34.4% 15.8% in the C range
- New restaurant, A on the first try, next inspection 600+ days later 40.3% 19.2% in the C range
- New restaurant, A on the re-check after failing the first 50.2% 26.0% in the C range
A new restaurant's first A is less reliable than an established one's, but only a little when it was earned on the first visit: 34.4% fail the next inspection, against 29.1% for an established A. The bigger difference is track record. A restaurant with two A grades in a row fails about one time in five.
The group that stands out is new restaurants that failed their first inspection and got their A on the re-check. Half of them fail their first routine inspection, and a quarter score in the C range. From the street, their A looks exactly like everyone else's.
When the wait runs long
For new restaurants that got an A on the first try, the timing of the next visit also matters. To put 600 days in calendar terms: a new restaurant that earned its A on New Year's Day 2025 would pass a year on January 1, 2026, the median wait on May 25, 2026, and 600 days on August 24, 2026, more than a year and a half later.
Show the numbers
| Wait | Restaurants |
|---|---|
| Under a month | 2 |
| 1 to 2 months | 10 |
| 2 to 3 months | 7 |
| 3 to 4 months | 5 |
| 4 to 5 months | 7 |
| 5 to 6 months | 5 |
| 6 to 7 months | 9 |
| 7 to 8 months | 4 |
| 8 to 9 months | 10 |
| 9 to 10 months | 9 |
| 10 to 11 months | 19 |
| 11 to 12 months | 93 |
| 12 to 13 months | 133 |
| 13 to 14 months | 143 |
| 14 to 15 months | 262 |
| 15 to 16 months | 389 |
| 16 to 17 months | 357 |
| 17 to 18 months | 300 |
| 18 to 19 months | 238 |
| 19 to 20 months | 184 |
| 20 to 21 months | 134 |
| 21 to 22 months | 93 |
| 22 to 23 months | 77 |
| 23 to 24 months | 72 |
| 24 to 25 months | 52 |
| 25 to 26 months | 27 |
| 26 to 27 months | 23 |
| 27 to 28 months | 18 |
| 28 to 29 months | 11 |
| 29 to 30 months | 7 |
New restaurants left 600 days or more before their first routine inspection fail it 40% of the time. Established restaurants left that long fail 31.4% of the time, so the long wait costs a new restaurant more.
The pattern is not a straight line, though. Restaurants inspected within a year also fail more often than those in the middle group. The data does not say why, and an early visit may have had a reason behind it that the record does not show.
The score behind the A
An A covers anything from 0 to 13 points, and the number matters. New restaurants whose first A was 0 to 5 points failed their first routine inspection 24.6% of the time. Those at 10 to 13 points failed 39.6% of the time. The same gap shows up for established restaurants (21.3% and 33.3%), and a new restaurant does slightly worse than an established one at every score.
What to look for on a new restaurant
An A on a new restaurant means one inspector found it clean on one visit, sometime after it opened. That is real information, but it is one visit. Three things help you read it:
- How many inspections are behind it. One pre-permit inspection is the thinnest record there is. Two A grades from routine inspections is the strongest in this data.
- Whether it failed first. An A earned on a re-inspection after a failed first visit is the least reliable A in this data.
- How old it is. A first A around 20 months old or more has gone well past the year the city aims for, and those fail their first routine inspection 40% of the time.
Our score does this for you. A restaurant whose only inspection is a pre-permit A cannot score above 85, and once that inspection is 600 days old it cannot score above 75. Either way, it says why. An A earned on a re-check after a failed first visit cannot score above 65 until a routine inspection happens. The full list is on how the score is built.
A note on the data
- The city's dataset only includes restaurants that are currently active, so everything here describes restaurants that are still open. Restaurants that closed before their first routine inspection are not in it.
- Only pre-permit inspections of restaurants that were already open are counted. The city also inspects some restaurants before they open, but those inspections are not graded.
- A routine inspection here means the next inspection that starts a new grading cycle. Visits in between, such as administrative ones, are skipped because they do not affect the grade.
- 52 restaurants still have a pre-permit A from more than three years ago as their only record. The data cannot tell us whether they have never been inspected again or have closed without the listing being updated, so they are not singled out here.
- Measured from the city's data as published on September 29, 2026.
Sources
- DOHMH New York City Restaurant Inspection Results, NYC Open Data. Every figure above is calculated from this.
- Food Service Establishments: Inspection Cycle and Letter Grading (PDF), NYC Health. The inspection schedule after an A, which it gives as 11 to 13 months.
- How We Score and Grade (PDF), NYC Health. Inspections of restaurants not yet open to the public are scored but not graded.
- Food Service Establishment Permit, NYC Business. A restaurant may open 22 days after applying, and the pre-permit inspection is made, unannounced, after it opens.
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