Guide
Does My Daycare Need Lead Certification in Pennsylvania? A Guide for Family Child Care Operators
For a family child care operator, lead certification often arrives through your child care license, not a rental license. Here's which Pennsylvania municipalities require it, and who has to perform the inspection.
Published August 16, 2026 · Pennsylvania
If you run a family child care home in Pennsylvania, lead certification usually reaches you through a different door than it reaches a landlord. A landlord runs into it at rental-license renewal. For a child care operator, it is attached to the license that lets you care for children at all – which means a property you own and have never rented can still need a lead-safe or lead-free certificate on file. Whether it applies to you depends less on the state than on the municipality your program sits in.
The short answer: it depends on your municipality, not the state
Pennsylvania does not run a single statewide lead-certification program for child care homes. Where the requirement exists, it is written into a local ordinance, and each municipality decides for itself whether to tie a lead-safe or lead-free certificate to its licensing. What the state does set is who is allowed to perform the inspection: the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry accredits and certifies the lead inspector-risk assessors these ordinances rely on, a credential the ordinances point back to by name.
Keystone Lead Certified operates in five of these municipalities – Philadelphia, Norristown, Chester, East Lansdowne, and Yeadon. Four of the five write child care into the ordinance directly. This guide covers those five. If your program sits somewhere else in Pennsylvania, the question to put to your local code office is the same one this guide answers for our towns: does my municipality tie lead certification to my child care license?
Why a daycare is a separate trigger from a rental
The clearest example is Philadelphia. Since January 1, 2020, the city has required the same lead-safe or lead-free certification – or proof the building was constructed after February 1978 – before it will issue or renew a Family Child Day Care license. That requirement lives in §6-814, a different section from the rental-licensing rule, and it does not care whether the property is ever rented. An owner-occupied family child care home in a pre-1978 Philadelphia rowhouse needs the certificate on the strength of the child care license alone.
Source: Philadelphia Code §6-814 (2020)
That is the pattern worth internalizing. For a child care operator, the certificate is a condition of the license that lets you operate, not a condition of renting. The February 1978 line is the dividing point in every version of this: residential housing built after lead-based paint was banned for that use is generally outside the requirement, and older buildings are in scope.
The daycare trigger across the towns we serve
Here is how each of the five ordinances treats a child care facility, and where the governing language lives.
| Municipality | Ordinance | What it means for a daycare |
|---|---|---|
| Philadelphia | Code §6-814 (in effect Jan 1, 2020) | A lead-safe or lead-free certificate, or proof the building was built after February 1978, is required to issue or renew a Family Child Day Care license. |
| Norristown | Ordinance 21-14, Chapter 200 | A lead report is required before the next certificate of occupancy is issued for the child care facility. |
| East Lansdowne | Ordinance No. 613, Ch. 11 Pt. 4 | Child-care facilities are named among the structures the ordinance covers, on the same three-year cycle as rentals. |
| Chester | Code Ch. 174, Art. IV | Child day-care centers are listed among covered facilities; the exact certification mechanism is not published in a readable form (see below). |
| Yeadon | Ordinance 2024-015 | The ordinance's operative text has never been published, so its daycare requirement, if any, cannot be confirmed (see below). |
The three cleanest of these are Philadelphia, Norristown, and East Lansdowne, each verifiable against the ordinance's own text. Norristown's Chapter 200 ties the daycare report to the next certificate of occupancy the borough issues for the facility.
Source: Norristown Code Chapter 200, §200-3, 'Lead Poisoning Prevention and Lead Hazard Control' (2021)
East Lansdowne's Ordinance 613 goes further and names child-care facilities outright, in its own list of the structures it covers:
“all dwellings constructed prior to 1978, child-care facilities, abandoned properties and condemned properties.”
Source: East Lansdowne Ordinance No. 613, Chapter 11 Part 4 (2022)
Chester belongs in the same list, with one honest caveat. The city said plainly when it passed the ordinance in 2023 that the law covers child day-care centers, but Chester's codified section text is not published in a form we can read and quote directly, so we do not state the exact certification mechanism a Chester daycare faces. Treat Chester as covered, with the details to confirm with the city, rather than as fully settled.
Source: City of Chester Code, Chapter 174, Article IV (lead poisoning prevention ordinance) (2023)
Yeadon: the ordinance exists, but its terms have never been published
Yeadon adopted Ordinance 2024-015, “Lead Inspections Established,” on January 16, 2025. We can confirm that vote from the borough's own meeting minutes. What we cannot confirm is whether, or how, it reaches a family child care home – because the ordinance's full operative text has never been published: not on the borough website, and not codified alongside the rest of Yeadon's municipal code.
So we will not tell you a Yeadon daycare is, or is not, required to certify. We will tell you the ordinance is on the books and that the borough's code department is demonstrably active, which makes asking the borough directly the only safe way to get a firm answer today.
Source: Yeadon Borough Council, January 16, 2025 legislative meeting minutes (2025)
Who is allowed to do the inspection
A child care operator does not certify their own building. The inspection has to be performed by the same category of professional the ordinances require of landlords: a Pennsylvania-licensed lead inspector-risk assessor, or an EPA-certified lead dust sampling technician, who collects dust-wipe samples, has them tested against EPA dust-lead standards at an accredited lab, and signs the certificate. Philadelphia's code spells this out; Norristown's and East Lansdowne's use nearly identical performer language.
Source: Philadelphia Code §6-801(1)
Why the requirement exists at all
The reason child care draws its own trigger is the population it serves. Lead harms young children most, and a licensed family child care home is, by definition, full of them. The scale is not abstract: in 2023, 285 children under six in Delaware County – which includes Chester, East Lansdowne, and Yeadon – had a confirmed elevated blood lead level, and only about a quarter of that age group was tested county-wide, so the true number of affected children is very likely higher than the confirmed count.
Source: PA Dept. of Health, 2023 Childhood Lead Surveillance Annual Report, Table 12 (2023)
What it costs
In Philadelphia and Norristown, the certificate itself does not carry a separate municipal lead fee – Philadelphia's Chapter 6-800 charges no city fee for the certification, and Norristown's Chapter 200 has no lead-cert line item on the borough fee schedule. A daycare operator's real costs there are two things, neither of them lead-specific: the private inspection, and whatever the municipality already charges for the child care certificate of occupancy or license. We have not independently located a published fee schedule confirming the same for East Lansdowne, Chester, or Yeadon – if you operate in one of those towns, confirm directly with the borough before assuming there is no lead-specific line item.
- The private lead inspection and lab work – what we do.
- Your ordinary child care license or certificate-of-occupancy fee – paid to the municipality, unchanged by the lead requirement.
We publish our inspection pricing in full on our pricing page, by property size, with no call for a quote.
Source: Philadelphia Code Chapter 6-800; Norristown Code Chapter 200 and borough fee schedule
One flat price for your daycare's lead certification, published up front.
We test, an accredited lab verifies the result, and we file the certificate – so it is on record before your child care license needs it.
See certification pricing