Catering license requirements by state
Who issues a caterer’s permit in your state, whether you can cook at home, and what the cottage food law lets you sell, plus the agency to confirm every answer with and a plain list of the states this review will not write up yet.
Food permitting in the United States is not federal and it is not uniform. In most states the health or agriculture department writes the code and a county or cityhealth department issues the permit, sets the fee and inspects; in the rest the state issues it directly. That single fact decides who you call first, and it is the field third-party guides get wrong most often, because writers default to "state health department". Every page below states the issuing level plainly, names the binding authority, and hedges anything this review could not confirm from a source it could read.
Reviewed August 2026
24 states, one page each
| State | Who issues the caterer's permit | Home production | Sales cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | Local: your county environmental health department | Cottage food route | No cap in the statute |
| Arkansas | State: the Arkansas Department of Health, through county health units | Cottage food route | None stated on the agency page read |
| California | Local: your county environmental health department | Cottage food route | Statutory base $75,000 (Class A) / $150,000 (Class B), adjusted annually for inflation |
| Connecticut | Split: the Department of Consumer Protection licenses cottage food, your local health district licenses caterers | Cottage food route | $50,000 total annual gross sales per calendar year |
| Florida | State: the Department of Business and Professional Regulation issues a named caterer license | Cottage food route | $250,000 in annual gross sales, the highest in the country |
| Georgia | Local: your county health department licenses caterers | Cottage food route | No limits on gross sales or units produced |
| Idaho | Local: one of Idaho’s seven public health districts | Cottage food route | None stated on the agency page read |
| Illinois | Local: your county or municipal health department, and Chicago is its own jurisdiction | Cottage food route | Not stated on the agency page read |
| Iowa | Split: the Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing, with some contracted local authorities | Cottage food route | No cap on the cottage food exemption |
| Maryland | Local: your county health department | Cottage food route | Not stated on the agency page read |
| Minnesota | Split: the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Health, with delegated county and city authorities | Cottage food route | $78,000 gross receipts, adjusted for inflation every two years |
| Mississippi | State: the Mississippi State Department of Health | Cottage food route | $35,000 in gross annual sales, raised from $20,000 by Senate Bill 326 (2020) |
| Missouri | Local: your county or city health department | Cottage food route | No cap in the statute |
| Nebraska | Split: the Department of Agriculture, with delegated local health departments | Cottage food route | No cap stated on the agency page read |
| New Jersey | Split: the state Department of Health for cottage food, your municipal health department for catering | Cottage food route | $50,000 in gross annual sales |
| New Mexico | Split: the Environment Department statewide, with Albuquerque running its own food program | Cottage food route | Not stated on the sources read |
| New York | Local: your county health department, or the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City | Cottage food route | No cap; no production limits are specified |
| Oklahoma | Split: the State Department of Health, with county and city-county health departments administering | Cottage food route | Under $75,000 in gross annual sales |
| Oregon | Split by sector: the Department of Agriculture for home kitchens, your county health department for catering | Cottage food route | No cap on the domestic kitchen license |
| Pennsylvania | Split: the Department of Agriculture, except where a county or city health department holds delegated authority | Cottage food route | No cap stated on the agency page read |
| Rhode Island | State: the Department of Health licenses everything; there is no county layer | Cottage food route | Not stated by the Department; a $50,000 figure circulates unconfirmed |
| Texas | Split: the Department of State Health Services, except in the many cities and counties with their own health departments | Cottage food route | $150,000 in annual gross income (confirm the current threshold) |
| Vermont | State: the Department of Health, Food and Lodging Program | Cottage food route | Exemptions at $10,000 and $30,000 in annual sales |
| Wyoming | Split: the Department of Agriculture, Consumer Health Services, with six local inspection programs | Cottage food route | No cap |
The 27 states this review will not write up yet
The source compendium covers all 51 jurisdictions. A state only gets a page here when its core claims were confirmed from a source that could actually be read, its agency link resolves, and there is enough state-specific substance to write about without padding. Where one of those failed, the reason is below rather than a page whose only variable is the state name. A hedged answer is a correct page; a confident wrong answer about a permit is the thing worth avoiding.
- Alabama
- Held for a later pass. The entry is verified but thinner than the shipped set (its distinctive facts are the removed income cap and a county review form), and this pass capped the first tranche at the states with the most state-specific substance.
- Alaska
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Every Alaska agency and legislature source refused an automated read, so the entire permissive regime rests on one trade-magazine article.
- Colorado
- Verified in the compendium, but the whole cdphe.colorado.gov host refuses automated requests and no Colorado agency page could be re-opened live for this review. Publishing an outbound agency link nobody could confirm is the defect this bar exists to prevent.
- Delaware
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Every Delaware source was an unparsed PDF or a moved page; the state-level (not county) posture is the only claim with a statutory reference.
- District of Columbia
- Held for a later pass. Verified and genuinely distinctive, but the fee figures are unconfirmed and this pass capped the first tranche.
- Hawaii
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Both the Department of Health pages and the administrative-rule mirror refused automated reads.
- Indiana
- Held for a later pass. The licensing structure is verified but the home-based vendor specifics are secondary-source because the agency publishes them as a PDF that did not convert.
- Kansas
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source, resting on a four-year-old third-party page while the Department of Agriculture site refused automated reads. Kansas has legislated in this area since.
- Kentucky
- Held for a later pass. The registration form, agency and legal citations are verified, but the cap and fee are both unconfirmed and the agency itself warns the program recently changed.
- Louisiana
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source, and its one readable source names the wrong agency for permitting, which is itself a reason not to publish.
- Maine
- Held for a later pass. Verified for the home food processor license, but the third-party source is a decade old and the food sovereignty ordinances mean the correct answer can depend on the town.
- Massachusetts
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source, and no agency page could be re-opened live. Structurally the most interesting state in the file (no cottage food law at all, roughly 350 town boards of health), which is exactly why it should not be written from third-party summaries.
- Michigan
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. The caps changed in March 2026 and index from October 2026, and every agency page refused an automated read, so no figure here is safe to print.
- Montana
- Compendium confidence: verify. Two overlapping home-food routes that no readable source reconciled.
- Nevada
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. The cap and the county fee are both unconfirmed, and the registering authority moves to a different department in July 2027.
- New Hampshire
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Both Department of Health and Human Services pages refused automated reads, so both fee figures are unconfirmed.
- North Carolina
- Held for a later pass. The two-agency split is verified and worth a page, but this pass capped the first tranche.
- North Dakota
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. The 2025 expansion that makes the state interesting is supported only by a search index, and the caterer licensing chain was never established.
- Ohio
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. The two-route structure and the wholesale provision are the whole story and neither was read from an agency or statutory source.
- South Carolina
- Held for a later pass. The variance mechanism is distinctive, but the agency was reorganized in 2024, its host no longer presents a valid certificate, and the only source read is a university publisher.
- South Dakota
- Held for a later pass. The licensing structure is verified but the entire cottage food side is unconfirmed, which would leave half the page hedged.
- Tennessee
- Compendium confidence: verify, and its own verification log calls it the weakest entry in the file: zero agency sources read, two flatly contradictory accounts in circulation, and the explicit instruction not to publish Tennessee specifics without a call.
- Utah
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Two parallel routes are corroborated across sources but no Department of Agriculture and Food page was read.
- Virginia
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. No primary source was read at all, and the one dollar figure on the page moved in July 2024.
- Washington
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. Every Department of Agriculture path returned a navigation shell, leaving the permit fee and the cap unconfirmed.
- West Virginia
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source. The law was reorganized by legislation signed in March 2026 and every figure in circulation predates it.
- Wisconsin
- Compendium confidence: secondary-source, and the home-baking right rests on a court injunction rather than a statute. Paraphrasing a judge’s order from a search summary is the wrong way to state a legal scope.
Once the permit is sorted, price the work
CaterKit costs every dish from your own ingredients, prices the quote at your margin, and sends it as a page the client can accept on their phone.
New to this? Start with the licenses, permits and food safety chapter, or the guide to starting a catering business.