Georgia child care licensing requirements

Not yet available in your state. KinderBee sells only in North Carolina today. This page is reference material — we publish what Georgia's rule text says because we read it, not because there is software you can buy from us here yet. What we sell in North Carolina

Ratios

Georgia's youngest infant band is not purely age-based: walking status, not age alone, decides which band applies (.30) — a detail that is easy to miss and easy to understaff against.

Youngest child in the room	Ratio
Under 18 months, not yet walking	1:6
Under 18 months, walking	1:8

Georgia's mixed-age group rule is also gated by licensed capacity (.32). Centers licensed for 19 or more children use one rule (youngest-child-comprises- more-than-20%-of-the-group); centers licensed for 18 or fewer use a stricter rule where a single child under three sets the ratio for the whole group, and the usual group-size caps do not apply at all.

Credentials

Georgia requires one person per classroom to hold both CPR and first aid (.33) — not one person for each, a single person covering both. Georgia has no staff TB test and no staff physical requirement.

Drills & records

Drill logs need only dates and times (.35) — Georgia's rules do not ask for headcounts or evacuation durations. Georgia also states no sleeping-infant check interval in its regulations.

Training

Annual training is 10 hours (.33(5)), with at least two hours each of literacy and child-development/health/safety topics, and no more than two hours of business topics — a ceiling, not just a floor. Two details often get inverted: transportation training counts toward the 10 hours (.36(3)), while CPR/first-aid hours do not (.14(1)(a)). The first year of employment is exempt entirely. Independent contractors, students-in-training, and volunteers are exempt; custodial and maintenance staff and volunteers who provide no direct care are also exempt.

Facility certificates

Georgia requires no recurring fire or sanitation certificate at all. That is a finding, not a gap in our reading. 591-1-1-.25(10) ("Fire Safety") requires that "a Center must be in compliance with applicable laws and regulations issued by the state fire marshal... including a certificate of occupancy if required prior to receiving any children for care" — a one-time, pre-opening event, not a renewed inspection. DECAL's own inspection authority at .37(a)(1) runs "at regular intervals as the Department may determine or at the expiration of the current License or Permit," stating no fixed cadence. No separate sanitation-certificate clause exists anywhere in the document; the only other health-department reference, .25(20), is about sewage and water-source approval. Confirmed by reading all forty-six rules, not inferred from another state's absence.

So Georgia is the one state in this library where KinderBee scores this category a pass with nothing on file — because Georgia's text asks for nothing recurring, and an absence the rule text confirms is not the same as a record we failed to collect. The product holds that distinction as a real value rather than a blank: a state whose interval we could not determine is scored not evaluated and never silently passed. Massachusetts and South Carolina are each handled that second way, on their own pages.

The one gap this leaves: we do not store the one-time certificate of occupancy itself. If an inspector asks to see that document, it is not in KinderBee, and the pass described above is a statement about Georgia's cadence, not about your paperwork being on hand.

These values are a fourth rule family, with provenance of its own rather than a share of the three dates in this page's status line: a full-document primary-text read recorded at organization/planning/VERIFICATION_2026-08-10.md §44 (CHA-400, 2026-10-06). Its tier is not asserted in this sentence. It is declared in the page's own source and checked against the product's rule database on every build, so a later re-read or a sixth state cannot leave it stale here unnoticed — docs/adr/0080 §1c: a tier claim names exactly one rule set, and names it somewhere a gate can see it.

What "verified" on this page claims — and what it does not

The three dates in this page's status line are provenance claims: each rule set's values and citations were read against primary Georgia rule text on that date, by a licensing compliance analyst, from the Secretary of State's own rules host at rules.sos.ga.gov/gac/591-1-1 rather than a mirror, and corrections were made where the read found them. That is not a coverage claim. docs/adr/0018 §1 is the rule that keeps the two apart: a verified rule set can still carry clauses nobody evaluated.

Obligations in Georgia's rule text we do not evaluate

• The licensed-capacity gate on the mixed-age rule. The rule described above has two branches. 591-1-1-.32(3) gives centres licensed for 18 or fewer the stricter one: "The age of the youngest child under three (3) years of age shall determine the Staff:child ratio," and the usual group-size caps do not apply at all. Our model has no licensed-capacity field, so it cannot pick a branch by capacity — it applies the capacity-≤18 rule to every mixed-age room, regardless of how many children the centre is actually licensed for. For a centre licensed 18 or fewer, that is an exact match: the rule our engine always applies is the one Georgia requires there. For a centre licensed 19 or more, it is stricter than Georgia's own more lenient more-than-20%-of-the-group rule — one eleven-month-old in a group of ten pulls the whole group to 1:6 under the rule we apply, where Georgia's actual ≥19 rule would ignore one child in ten. Every gap on these five pages scores stricter than the state, and this one, read correctly, is no exception.
• Conditional nap relief, in both of Georgia's forms. .32(5) permits doubling in the daytime for children three and over, conditionally; .32(6) permits it at night when a majority are sleeping, with no age floor. Neither is modelled, which means neither is granted — we score stricter than Georgia. Note that the two must never be merged: applying the night rule's no-age-floor version during the day would understaff sleeping infants, so seeding neither is the deliberate choice.
• The food and nutrition training. 591-1-1-.33(4) requires that within the first year of employment the Director and the person primarily responsible for food preparation receive four clock hours of training in food nutrition. We do not evaluate it: it is a one-off obligation attached to two specific positions, and our training model carries only recurring quotas. It also lands in the very year .33(5)(a) exempts from annual hours, so a director's first year looks emptier on our dashboard than it is in the regulations.
• The Provisional Employee supervision duty. .09(1)(d) lets a provisional employee be present on a fingerprint determination alone, "but must be supervised at all times by a Director or Employee with a valid and current satisfactory Comprehensive Records Check Determination." Our model holds one cleared/not-cleared state per person, so it can neither express the supervision condition nor safely count such a person as a supervising adult. Unevaluated, and named rather than approximated for exactly that reason.
• The 180-day industry-lapse recheck trigger. .09(1)(l) requires a fresh Comprehensive Records Check determination for anyone with "a lapse from the child care industry of 180 calendar days or more" since their last one. That names a real interval — 180 days — but the anchor, the candidate's last day in the industry, is not a field this model carries: the same known-interval, missing-anchor shape as South Carolina's break-in-service fingerprint re-check, and carried the same way in the product's own unevaluated-obligation registry (ga_child_care_industry_lapse_recheck). Two sibling triggers in the same clause — an arrest or charge for a covered Crime, and "when the Department so requests" — name no interval or date to compute from at all, so neither is a clock our model could even hold incompletely. They are real obligations that are your calendar, not ours.
• Training-record field completeness is stricter than Georgia's text. 591-1-1-.33(6) requires only proof of completion on file and enumerates no fields. We apply a six-field union drawn from the two states that do enumerate (Colorado and South Carolina), so a complete, on-time Georgia record can be flagged incomplete for a field Georgia never asked for.

Record categories this state does not require

• Two categories where Georgia's silence is the finding, not ours. A full-document read (2026-10-06) confirmed Georgia states no playground inspection record or checklist — it sets equipment construction and maintenance standards instead — and no parent-conference cadence. Alongside the no-headcount drill logs and the absent sleeping-infant interval described above, these are places where writing in a requirement to look thorough would mean inventing a Georgia rule.

The boundary on all of it

Every record category the product's inspection packet asks for now has a section that scores it — the packet's own not yet evidenced list is empty, for the first time since we started keeping it. Read that as a claim about structure and nothing else. The packet still hard-wires its own summary to not complete, and the obligations listed above are why: a category can have a section, and that section can still rest on a clause nobody evaluated. An empty gap list is not a pass. We would rather write that sentence than let the absence of this list read as one.

KinderBee is at a pilot, disclosed stage, not a finished compliance guarantee. We model rules from primary text and show you what the rule says and when a record stops satisfying it. We do not certify that your centre is compliant, and no software can — an unannounced licensing visit (45 CFR 98.42(b)(2)(i)(B)) assesses your centre, not your vendor. Promoting a rule set to verified does not move that line, and every one of our rule sets reading verified does not move it either: verified is a statement about how carefully we read the rules, not about how much of them the engine fires. The inspection packet inside the product hard-wires its own summary to not complete for the same reason.