Safety shouldn’t depend on research, luck, or a headline.

Who this is for

Anyone keeping an eye on risks for themselves and the people they look after. That rarely means one age group or one kind of product — it’s a crib and a prescription and the dog’s food in the same week, and just as often it’s an ageing parent’s medication or your own car.

So The Recall Registry covers the whole household, and files everything by who it’s for rather than by which agency issued it. You shouldn’t need to know that car seats come from a different government body than cribs.

And increasingly, businesses that have to check. A children’s resale shop can’t legally sell a recalled product. A childcare centre gets asked about its equipment at inspection. The searching is the same work — what differs is that they need to prove they did it. That’s what our Services page describes.

Where the data comes from

The Recall Registry gathers 22,139 recalls from three US government agencies and refreshes twice a day:

• CPSC — toys, cribs, nursery gear, furniture, appliances, cleaning products and household goods
• FDA — food, infant formula, prescription and over-the-counter medicine, supplements and pet food
• NHTSA — car seats, boosters and vehicles

What we leave out, and why

Comprehensive and useful pull against each other, so there are three deliberate limits. None of them is technical — they’re judgements, and we’d rather state them than have you wonder why something is missing.

• Food recalls go back one year. Perishable food has a literal shelf life. Spinach recalled in 2019 was eaten or thrown away within a fortnight, and showing it today would be noise pretending to be safety. Things made for children — formula, baby food — are exempt and keep their full history, because a tin sits in a cupboard.
• Medicine goes back three years. Roughly how long a prescription actually stays in a cabinet.
• Vehicles have their own page. There are more vehicle recalls than everything else on this site combined. Mixed in, they’d be all you saw. They are complete and fully searchable — search a make or model and you’ll find it.

How we grade urgency

The colour band on each recall is our own judgement, not an agency rating. We reserve the top level for deaths that have actually been reported and for hazards that kill specifically — a small child, someone frail. A notice that merely uses the phrase “risk of serious injury or death” — which most of them do — is not enough on its own.

We would rather be occasionally too calm than routinely alarming. A site that shouts at you about everything is one you stop reading.

What The Recall Registry is not

We are not a government agency and we do not issue recalls. We are not an official alert service. We summarise notices published by others and link back to the original every time.

If a detail here matters to a decision you’re making, check it against the agency’s own page — the link is on every recall.