Every Shot California Requires for School, and the 872 Places in L.A. County That Give Them

Five vaccines admit a child to kindergarten, and one of them is expressly not required to reach seventh grade. A school that admits a child without the full set is ordered by statute to send that child home if the doses never arrive. We read all fifteen sections of the law and counted every clinic on the county's own provider list.

Los Angeles Unified's 2026-27 year began on Wednesday, August 12, and somewhere in the county this week a school office is holding a folder that is one line short. This is the most ordinary emergency in California education, and it is also the one where the paperwork is genuinely unforgiving: the immunization rule is not a school policy, it is a state statute, and it tells the school what to do rather than asking.

So here is the whole thing in order — what is required, what is not, what happens if it is missing, and where in Los Angeles County to get it done. We read all fifteen sections of the chapter of the Health and Safety Code that sets these rules, and we counted every entry on the county's own list of clinics that vaccinate children at no cost or low cost. There are 872 of them.

The five vaccines

Los Angeles County's Department of Public Health publishes the requirement in a parents' guide, and the table is short enough to read once. A child admitted at transitional kindergarten or any grade from kindergarten through twelve needs:

• Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — five doses. Four are enough if one of them was given on or after the fourth birthday, and three are enough if one was given on or after the seventh. The vaccine can be DTaP, DTP, Tdap or Td; the county's guide accepts any of them toward the count.
• Polio — four doses. Three are enough if one was given on or after the fourth birthday. Oral or injected, either counts.
• Hepatitis B — three doses. This is the one with the exception below.
• Measles, mumps and rubella — two doses, both given on or after the first birthday. A dose given at eleven months does not count and will have to be repeated.
• Varicella, which is chickenpox — two doses. Usually given at twelve months and again between four and six.

You are wondering whether a child who actually had chickenpox is finished with that line. That is a question for the school and the provider, not for a website, because the statute names the disease rather than the paperwork and the county's guide prints no substitution. Ask before you assume, and ask early enough to get a dose if the answer is no.

The vaccine that stops mattering in seventh grade

Seventh grade is a second checkpoint, not a repeat of the first, and the difference runs in both directions.

On the way in, there is an extra requirement. Section 120335(d) says a school shall not unconditionally admit or advance a pupil to seventh grade "unless the pupil has been fully immunized against pertussis, including all pertussis boosters appropriate for the pupil's age." In practice that is one dose of Tdap given on or after the seventh birthday — and the trap is that a booster given at age six, which is a perfectly normal thing for a pediatrician to have done, does not satisfy it. The dose has to be on the far side of the seventh birthday. Check the date on the card, not the number of entries.

On the way out, one requirement drops. The same section, subdivision (c), is unusually blunt: "full immunization against hepatitis B shall not be a condition by which the governing authority shall admit or advance any pupil to the 7th grade level." Hepatitis B is required to start school and is not required to move into seventh grade. The county's own parents' guide tries to say this in a parenthetical that reads "Note required for 7th grade entry" — one letter away from its own meaning. The statute is what governs, and the statute says the exemption is real.

Conditional admission, and the sentence that ends it

A child who is behind is not automatically turned away. Section 120340 lets a school admit a pupil who has not been fully immunized "on condition that within time periods designated by regulation of the department he or she presents evidence that he or she has been fully immunized." That is conditional admission, and it is the reason a child with two of five DTaP doses can start on the first day.

What most families do not know is what the law obliges the school to do at the end of that window. Section 120375(b): the school "shall prohibit from further attendance any pupil admitted conditionally who failed to obtain the required immunizations within the time limits allowed in the regulations of the department." Not may. The same section requires the school to review each conditional entrant's record periodically, and to file a written report on new entrants' immunization status with the state and the local health department at least once a year. Conditional admission is a countdown with a calendar entry attached to it in someone else's office.

The length of that countdown is the one number we will not print. The statute delegates it to state regulation, and the specific interval lives in the state health department's own conditional-admission guide, which the county links from its school immunization toolkit. Those state documents did not load for us on the day we wrote this — the state's server returned an error to every request we made — so we are printing no interval we could not read. Ask the school office for the date on your child's conditional admission, in writing, and treat it as the real deadline. Every other date on this page is a fact; that one is a phone call.

Exemptions: one door, and it is narrower than its reputation

California stopped accepting personal belief exemptions with Senate Bill 277 in 2015. It did not cancel the ones already on file, and the way it wound them down is worth following, because the arithmetic has now finished running.

Section 120335(g) says a pupil whose belief-based letter was on file before January 1, 2016 keeps it "until the pupil enrolls in the next grade span," and it defines exactly three grade spans: birth to preschool; kindergarten and grades one through six, including transitional kindergarten; and grades seven through twelve. There is no span after the third. So the longest a pre-2016 exemption could possibly last belonged to a student already in the seven-through-twelve span in January 2016 — a seventh grader that year, who reached twelfth grade in the spring of 2021 and left. On an ordinary progression, no student enrolled in a California school this year is still covered by a personal belief exemption. The category is closed.

Medical exemptions still exist, and they have been through the same wringing-out. Section 120372 required the state to build a standardized electronic form transmitted to the California Immunization Registry, and says that since January 1, 2021 that form "shall be the only documentation of a medical exemption that the governing authority may accept." The form has to name the issuing physician's California license number, state how long that physician has treated the child, explain why the child's own primary care physician is not the one signing if they are not, and give a separate medical basis for every individual vaccine. A temporary exemption cannot run longer than a year, and no exemption may extend past the grade span it was issued in.

The older medical exemptions ran out on the same clock as the belief letters. Ones issued before January 1, 2020 were allowed to continue "until the child enrolls in the next grade span," which put the last of them in twelfth grade in the spring of 2025. In 2026-27, every valid medical exemption in a California school is a form generated in the state registry. Los Angeles County's public health department says as much at the top of its school toolkit, in a notice aimed at schools rather than parents: only a medical exemption issued in that system, or proof of the required vaccines, meets the documentation requirement for admission and attendance.

Four situations the law treats differently

Foster children are admitted, records or no records. Section 120341 requires the school to admit a foster child whose immunization records are unavailable or missing. The obligation to go find the records survives; the obligation to keep the child out does not.

Home schooling and classroom-free independent study are outside the statute. Subdivision (f) of section 120335 says the section does not apply to a pupil in a home-based private school, or to a pupil enrolled in an independent study program who "does not receive classroom-based instruction." The qualifier is the whole rule — an independent study program with classroom hours is a school for these purposes.

Special education services are not the leverage. Subdivision (h) says nothing in the section stops a pupil with an individualized education program from accessing the special education and related services that program requires.

The rules stop at eighteen, and at the community college door. Section 120360 exempts anyone eighteen or older, and anyone seeking admission to a community college, from the whole chapter. A high school senior who turns eighteen in October is, as of that birthday, outside a law that governed them in September.

One rule cuts the other way, and it is the one that surfaces during an outbreak. Section 120370(b) allows a child whose record does not show immunity to a listed disease to be temporarily excluded from school if there is good cause to believe they have been exposed to it — until the local health officer is satisfied the child is no longer at risk. That exclusion does not require a missed deadline. It requires a case in the building.

Where to get them: 872 entries, counted

The county publishes a document most parents never see. Its Vaccines For Children public provider list, last updated in May 2026, names every clinic in Los Angeles County that provides, in its own words, "no-cost or low-cost immunizations to children 18 years of age and younger." It runs fifteen pages, and it is a table rather than a map, which is probably why it does not circulate.

We pulled the file and counted it. There are 872 entries, spread across 105 city and community labels and 199 ZIP codes. Los Angeles carries 204 of them; Long Beach has 45, Huntington Park 27, El Monte 26, Pomona 23. Nineteen communities have exactly one — including Avalon, where the single entry is the medical center on Catalina Island. A note on our own count: the county's list spells El Monte two ways, so 105 labels describe 104 places, and we have counted them as one.

138 of the 872 also serve uninsured and underinsured adults nineteen and older, and those sit in 51 of the communities. The list marks them in a "people served" column, which is worth reading before driving anywhere with a teenager who has just aged out of the pediatric column.

Two consent rules govern the visit, and the county states both plainly: children twelve and older may consent for themselves to the HPV and hepatitis B vaccines, and for everything else a parent or guardian has to consent. Bring the yellow card if you have one. Call first — the county's instruction, not ours, is to confirm which vaccines a clinic actually stocks and what its hours are before you go.

The six county clinics, and the fee nobody mentions

Underneath that list sit the county's own public health centers, which run nurse-only clinics that give childhood immunizations. There are six. We compared their published schedules, and the pattern is more useful than the addresses.

Five of the six hold exactly one late session a week, running to 7:30 p.m. — Pacoima (13300 Van Nuys Blvd.) on Monday, Glendale (501 N. Glendale Ave.) on Tuesday, Central (241 N. Figueroa St., downtown) on Wednesday, and both Martin Luther King Jr. (11833 S. Wilmington Ave.) and Whittier (7643 S. Painter Ave.) on Thursday. Monrovia (330 W. Maple Ave.) has no evening at all, and is closed Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every one of the six closes by 11:30 a.m. on Friday. If you work a standard week, there is one evening in your part of the county and it is a different night depending on where you live.

Now the part that surprises people at the counter. The county's nurse-only clinic schedule sets an administration fee of $15 per patient per visit, or $30 for a family of two or more, and waives it for patients with Medi-Cal or Medicare who bring the card to registration. "Free clinic" is the phrase everyone uses; "no-cost or low-cost" is the phrase the county uses, and the gap between them is fifteen dollars.

Here is the thing to know if fifteen dollars is the obstacle. The vaccines themselves are federally supplied, and the state's rules for providers in the program are explicit: enrolled providers never bill for the vaccines, are capped on what they may charge to administer them, and may not "deny vaccines due to inability to pay." That is a condition of the provider's participation, printed on the state's own provider page. It is a sentence worth being able to quote at a front desk.

The county centers also ask you to arrive fifteen minutes before an appointment, note that clinics open half an hour after registration begins, and say a limited number of same-day walk-in appointments exist. For a referral to a clinic near you, the county's public health information line is 1-833-540-0473.

Two more things worth knowing

Long Beach and Pasadena are not the county. Both cities run their own health departments and, as the county's clinic page states, are not served by Los Angeles County Public Health. The state law is identical there; the phone number and the clinics are not.

A lost card is not a lost year. The county's parents' guide is direct about this: the clinic or doctor's office that gave the shots can reprint the record, past schools keep and verify immunization records, and the California Immunization Registry holds them even if you have changed doctors or moved within the state. And if nothing can be found, the guide states that it is safe for a child to receive some immunizations again — which is a slower answer than a phone call to the old pediatrician, but it is an answer, and it is not exclusion.

The county is legally on the hook for supply. This is the least-known sentence in the chapter and the reason the 872-entry list exists at all. Section 120350 requires the county health officer to "organize and maintain a program to make immunizations available to all persons" the law requires to be immunized, and says that where the cost to the county exceeds what it recovers, the county pays it. The state made the shots mandatory and made the county responsible for their being obtainable. The list is that obligation, printed.

Every requirement on this page was read from the text of the California Health and Safety Code at the section linked beside it, and every clinic count, fee, address and clinic hour was read from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health document linked beside it, on August 14, 2026. The county's provider list carries its own revision date of May 2026 and its own instruction to call ahead; clinic hours change, and the schedule on the county's page is the one that governs. This page will be re-verified and updated in place before each school year, with the changes noted here.