Why there is no national liquor licence database
Alcohol licensing is 51 separate systems, and most of them are closed. What is actually available, and what is not.
Alcohol is the most locally regulated product in the United States. The Twenty-first Amendment handed control to the states, and every state built its own agency, its own licence taxonomy and its own records system. There is no federal retail register and there never has been.
What that means in practice
Fifty-one agencies, no shared schema, and licence class codes that mean different things in different states. A “package store” in Connecticut and a “package store permit” in Texas are related concepts with different privileges. Even the word for the geographic unit changes — county in Texas and New York, town in Connecticut.
Why most states are unreachable
We tested every plausible source. The pattern is consistent and it is not about the data being secret:
- Bot protection. California’s ABC returns a hard block to anything that is not an interactive browser session. The data is public; the door is shut to software.
- Files instead of feeds. Washington publishes dated Excel workbooks. Florida’s bulk download page returns a 404. These are published, but not queryable.
- Pay per search. Several states charge per lookup.
- Fragments. Missouri’s open-data portal has a “liquor licences” dataset containing 388 rows — recent issuances, not a register.
- Non-tabular listings. Oregon’s OLCC datasets are registered on an open-data portal but are file links, not tables. Querying one returns an error.
The three that work
Texas, New York and Connecticut each publish a genuine, queryable, keyless API over their live register. That is why they are the whole of this site. When a fourth state opens one, adding it is a configuration change here, not a rebuild — the coverage page tracks the state of play.
Why we don’t just scrape the rest
Because a scraped copy goes stale, and a stale licence record is worse than no licence record. Someone checking whether a permit is current needs today’s answer. Every number on this site is fetched at the moment you load the page.