Hillsborough County Restaurant Grades, By the Numbers

Behind the Kitchen Door — a data-driven county snapshot from InspectFL

Hillsborough County is Tampa Bay’s biggest restaurant market by a wide margin — Tampa, Brandon, Plant City, Riverview, and everything in between add up to 4,696 active restaurants in InspectFL’s current dataset, more than any other county in the region. A general overview of Hillsborough’s recent inspection activity already lives on this site. This post skips the recent-activity recap and goes straight to the grade math: exactly how many of those 4,696 restaurants currently hold each letter grade, and how that mix compares to Pinellas County next door.

The full grade breakdown

Roughly four out of five graded Hillsborough restaurants (79.6%) sit at a B or better, and A-grade spots alone outnumber every other grade combined. The bottom end is thinner than it might look on a heat map — an F grade is genuinely uncommon, showing up on about 1 in 19 currently-graded restaurants.

How Hillsborough stacks up against Pinellas

Hillsborough and Pinellas are Tampa Bay’s two biggest restaurant markets, and they’re the only two counties in the region large enough for a grade-mix comparison to mean much. The gap is bigger than the restaurant-count difference alone would suggest.

Despite tracking about 1,370 more restaurants than Pinellas, Hillsborough posts a higher A-grade share and lower F-grade share — and fewer total logged violations per restaurant (16.9 vs. 21.9). Bigger market, cleaner mix. Pinellas isn’t a disaster by any stretch — 72.7% of its restaurants still sit at a B or better — but its F-grade share is essentially double Hillsborough’s.

What’s actually driving the violation counts

The 16.9 violations-per-restaurant figure for Hillsborough breaks down into three severity tiers, tracked separately by DBPR: critical (2.9/restaurant), major (4.8/restaurant), and minor (9.2/restaurant). Minor findings make up more than half the total — the kind of paperwork, labeling, and maintenance items that show up on almost every inspection somewhere, rather than the food-temperature or pest findings that actually move a grade. That split matters: a restaurant can accumulate a long violation history over years of inspections and still hold a current A, because the grade reflects the recent inspection record, not the lifetime tally.

Bottom line

If you’re eating out in Hillsborough County right now, the odds favor you: roughly half of the county’s restaurants currently hold the top grade, and F-graded spots are genuinely rare. That’s a county-wide signal, not a guarantee for any single address — the next step is always the same one: pull up the exact restaurant you’re about to walk into and check its own current grade and inspection history before you sit down.

Browse the full Hillsborough County restaurant list, compare against Pinellas County, or search any Florida restaurant directly.

Related: Tampa & Hillsborough recent inspection activity · Pinellas County recent inspection activity · Florida counties with the highest violation rates

Grade and violation counts reflect InspectFL’s current Hillsborough and Pinellas County dataset, sourced from Florida DBPR public inspection records. The InspectFL Health Score and grade rollups are our own calculation based on publicly available data and are not an official DBPR rating. For the authoritative record on any specific restaurant, see myfloridalicense.com.