California Restaurant & Bar Opening Index
A standing count of California hospitality businesses that have applied for a liquor licence and not yet opened — compiled daily from public Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control records. Free to cite with attribution.
Where they are
| County | Businesses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | 758 | 23.3% |
| San Diego | 300 | 9.2% |
| Orange | 237 | 7.3% |
| Santa Clara | 176 | 5.4% |
| Riverside | 151 | 4.6% |
| San Francisco | 123 | 3.8% |
| Napa | 116 | 3.6% |
| San Bernardino | 116 | 3.6% |
| Alameda | 109 | 3.4% |
| Sonoma | 108 | 3.3% |
| Sacramento | 104 | 3.2% |
| Contra Costa | 76 | 2.3% |
| Fresno | 72 | 2.2% |
| San Joaquin | 70 | 2.2% |
| Kern | 63 | 1.9% |
Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange account for 40% of all pending hospitality openings in the state.
What kind of venue
| Type | Businesses |
|---|---|
| Restaurant | 2515 |
| Winery | 359 |
| Bar | 274 |
| Brewery | 105 |
How long they have been waiting
| Pending for | Businesses |
|---|---|
| 0–30 days | 352 |
| 31–90 days | 737 |
| 91–180 days | 553 |
| More than 180 days | 978 |
| Date not published by the state | 633 |
The median application has been pending 121 days. A licence application is not a short formality: most of these businesses filed months before they expect to open.
Most active cities
| City | County | Businesses |
|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | Los Angeles | 268 |
| San Diego | San Diego | 154 |
| San Francisco | San Francisco | 124 |
| San Jose | Santa Clara | 86 |
| Napa | Napa | 64 |
| Sacramento | Sacramento | 55 |
| Fresno | Fresno | 45 |
| Bakersfield | Kern | 34 |
| Temecula | Riverside | 33 |
| Oakland | Alameda | 32 |
| Santa Rosa | Sonoma | 31 |
| Long Beach | Los Angeles | 28 |
| Saint Helena | Napa | 26 |
| Modesto | Stanislaus | 25 |
| Paso Robles | San Luis Obispo | 22 |
What this measures — and what it does not
This is a standing count, not a growth rate. It says how many businesses are in the pipeline today, in which counties, and how long they have been waiting.
It deliberately does not report month-over-month change, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because the mistake is easy to make with this data. The state publishes no filing date on pending records; FirstVendor recovers dates by walking its dated daily reports backwards. Those reports only list applications still pending, so every earlier month has been drained by applications that were since issued or withdrawn. Charting filing dates from that source produces a curve rising steeply toward the present — which reflects issuance, not activity. Anyone plotting this data without accounting for that will publish a growth story that is an artefact.
FirstVendor began capturing daily snapshots on 2026-08-28 and has 2 days of history. A trend section will appear here once there are at least 28 days — measured from observed change, not reconstructed from the record.
Using this data
Figures update daily and may be cited with attribution to FirstVendor and a link to this page. The underlying records are public and published by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control; FirstVendor's contribution is resolution, deduplication and dating, not the records themselves.