Background Valid methods for assessing women’s experiences of maternity care are essential to the global efforts toward providing positive childbirth environments for all women in all health facilities. Methods This criterion validity study used observation of childbirth as the reference standard compared to exit interviews with women upon discharge with a live baby, usually within 24 hours of childbirth. We investigated eight positive and sixteen negative maternity care experience indicators. Data were collected from ten primary healthcare facilities in Gombe State, northeast Nigeria, in August 2018 and August 2019. Data analysis involved tabulation of demographic characteristics of women and childbirth context, computation of individual level validity metrics including the area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) and estimating population level validity using the inflation factor (IF). Results A total of 724 women were observed and interviewed at the time of discharge (exit) following facility childbirth, 15% of whom were adolescents, 99% were married, 43% had no formal education, and a skilled birth attendant had attended only 12%. The prevalence of positive maternity care experience indicators ranged between 25% and 96% in childbirth observations. For these positive indicators, the agreement between childbirth observations and exit interviews ranged from 55% to 97%. Six of the eight positive maternity care experience indicators had high overall validity, meaning AUC≥0.70 and 0.75<IF<1.25, with high sensitivity (89% to 99%) and moderate to high specificity (44% to 84%). The prevalence of the 16 negative maternity care experience indicators ranged between 0.1% and 18% in childbirth observations. For these negative indicators, agreement ranged from 87% to 99%. Just six of the 16 negative maternity care experience indicators met the criteria for validation analysis; and these showed low to moderate sensitivity (32% to 74%), high specificity (97% to 100%) and moderate (0.60<AUC<0.70) to high (AUC≥0.70) individual-level validity. Conclusions In this high mortality setting with relatively low coverage of skilled attendance at birth, exit interviews with women following facility-based childbirth care provided responses consistent with the observation of childbirth for eight positive and six negative maternity care experience indicators.