Albany County makes restaurants post their inspection result at the door, using four ratings: Excellent, Good, Fair and Unsatisfactory. In the 1,359 routine restaurant inspections the county ran between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026, 240 (17.7%) found at least one critical, or “red,” violation, well below the 27.1% rate for New York outside New York City. Of the inspections where the inspector noted the posted rating, 88.6% were Excellent and 0.9% were Unsatisfactory.
These are our counts from the New York State Department of Health dataset Food Service Establishment Inspections: Beginning 2005 (rows updated October 22, 2026, inspections through October 16). The rating comes from the inspector’s comment line on each record.
| Albany County, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026 | Result |
|---|---|
| Routine restaurant inspections | 1,359 at 1,020 restaurants |
| At least one red violation | 240 (17.7%); state outside NYC 27.1% |
| Two or more red violations | 5.6%; state 10.6% |
| Red violation still uncorrected at the end | 0 |
| Rating noted: Excellent / Good / Fair / Unsatisfactory | 846 / 56 / 44 / 9 |
| Return visit within 60 days of a red | 42.5% (median 14 days) |
How to look up an Albany County restaurant
- Open the state lookup Food Service Establishment: Last Inspection and filter County to ALBANY, then search the restaurant’s name or street. This shows the most recent inspection only.
- For older visits, use the full inspection history dataset and filter on the same facility code. Each violation is its own row, so one inspection can fill several lines.
- Read the Inspection Comments column. Albany County inspectors usually write the rating there, for example “Excellent compliance posted on 11/13/2025.”
- At the restaurant, the same rating should be on a sign near the front entrance.
The state data page and the county permit rules are summarized in our New York State inspection results by county guide, which compares Albany with 25 other health departments.
What Albany County’s Excellent, Good, Fair and Unsatisfactory signs mean
The county started requiring the signs on July 1, 2012. Its Fall 2012 HEALTHtoday newsletter describes a rating matrix that counts blue (minor) and red (serious) violations, says a restaurant rated Unsatisfactory must close voluntarily and is reinspected within days, and puts fines at $100 and up, to the $2,000 state maximum, scaled to how serious and how repeated a red violation is. The inspection criteria themselves stay the state’s. At the time, the county said only it and New York City required an inspection result on display.
The county does not publish the matrix as a point table, so the records give the clearest picture of how the ratings lined up with red violations in the last twelve months:
| Posted rating | Inspections | With a red | With 2+ reds | Next visit within 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excellent | 846 | 12.4% | 0.1% (1) | — |
| Good | 56 | 71.4% | 30.4% | 35.7% (median 13 days) |
| Fair | 44 | 86.4% | 65.9% | 47.7% (median 15 days) |
| Unsatisfactory | 9 | 100% | 100% | 6 of 9 (median 7 days) |
A red violation corrected on the spot can still leave a restaurant at Excellent: 105 Excellent inspections had a red, and only one of them had two or more. Two or more reds almost always pulled the sign down to Good or lower. Another 404 inspections had no rating written in the comments, mostly clean visits.
Red violation rates in Colonie, Bethlehem and the City of Albany
| Municipality | Routine inspections | With a red |
|---|---|---|
| Bethlehem | 105 | 21.9% |
| Colonie | 418 | 20.6% |
| City of Albany | 543 | 17.1% |
| Guilderland | 130 | 16.9% |
| Cohoes | 46 | 6.5% |
Permit type split the rates more sharply than town did. Permits coded Restaurant had a red in 21.6% of 965 inspections; permits coded as general Food Service Establishment, which include many counters and cafes with little cooking, had one in 6.8% of 339. Taverns had one red in 25 inspections.
Albany County’s most frequent red violations
| Item | What it covers | Albany | State outside NYC |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5E | Not enough working refrigeration to hold food at 45°F | 3.5% | 4.0% |
| 5B | Cooked food not cooled fast enough (120°F to 70°F in 2 hours, 70°F to 45°F in 4) | 3.1% | 3.7% |
| 5A | Cold food above 45°F | 2.9% | 3.6% |
| 1H | Food from an unapproved source, spoiled or adulterated | 2.7% | 3.6% |
| 5C | Food left at room temperature | 2.4% | 7.0% |
| 6A | Hot food below 140°F | 1.8% | 3.0% |
Percentages are shares of all routine inspections. The biggest gap from the state is 5C: Albany inspectors cite room-temperature storage at about a third of the statewide rate. The most common blue items were 8A food protection (36.6% of inspections), 12E handwashing sinks (21.5%) and 11A dishwashing (20.1%). Our guide to New York critical violation codes explains each item number.
What follows a red violation in Albany County
Albany County came back within 60 days after 102 of the 240 inspections with a red (42.5%), a median of 14 days later, and 67.6% of those return visits found no red. Monroe County, by comparison, returned after 97.8%; see our Monroe County results. Most Albany restaurants had one routine inspection in the year (716 of 1,020), 271 had two and 33 had three or more.
In Albany, a red was followed by another red more often than a clean visit was. When an inspection with a red was followed by another routine inspection, that one also had a red 36.3% of the time, against 14.6% after a clean inspection. In 17.5% of cases the same red item came back.
The red rate also shifted through the year: 11.5% to 12.5% from October through December 2025, rising to 28.8% in May 2026 and falling to 10.3% in September. For what a failed visit leads to in other places, see what happens if a restaurant fails a health inspection.
How we counted
We kept routine inspections (type “Inspection”) of permits described as Restaurant, Restaurant/Catering Operation, Tavern or Food Service Establishment, dated October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, and counted one inspection per facility per date. The rating is the first “Excellent, Good, Fair or Unsatisfactory compliance” phrase in the inspection comments. The dataset lists active facilities, so restaurants that closed during the year drop out. A return visit is any later inspection of the same facility within 60 days. To report a problem at an Albany County restaurant, use the state food complaint page, which routes complaints to the county.
North and west of Albany, Saratoga County found reds in 35.6% of its routine restaurant inspections over the same months and Schenectady County in 44.8%.
New York State Department of Health data and Albany County Department of Health pages checked October 25, 2026.