One truck. Fifty rulebooks.
Your truck is mobile. Your permits are not. Until this year almost every city wrote its own permit rulebook — then Texas, Colorado, Utah, and Oklahoma started tearing theirs up and replacing them, and plenty of official pages still teach the retired rules. This site tracks the new ones, state by state and city by city, with the date each rule was checked.
The free checker
Tell it where your truck is based, what permit you hold, what you sell, and where you want to go. It answers from the state-law layer: what travels with you, what the new place still requires, the steps in order, and the fees we have actually verified — never invented.
Free. No account. Nothing leaves this page. Tell it the permit you hold and where you want to sell. It answers from the state-law layer we track — with the date it was checked, and an honest flag wherever a row is still being double-checked.
Start where you are
One state license replaced every city permit on July 1, 2026 — and ~19,000 vendors were pushed through a brand-new queue. The Texas hub: types, fees, the queue, and what cities may no longer demand.
Colorado and Utah now let a license from one jurisdiction unlock the state; Oklahoma went further and made one license good everywhere. Colorado · Utah · Oklahoma.
Most states still permit county by county or city by city. The 50-state table shows who issues yours, whether it travels, and the commissary rule — each row stamped with its check date.
Why this site exists
The National Food Truck Association's own getting-started advice ends with: call your city hall and your regional health department. Meanwhile the rules are being rewritten in public: Texas's new state agency acknowledged it could not meet its own 14-day inspection deadline while thousands of vendors waited; a major Texas city's website kept teaching the permit process the legislature had abolished; a Utah city's pages still demand a background check its own state law forbids. The information is fragmented, fast-moving, and sometimes wrong at the source. That is exactly what a compiled, date-stamped dataset is for.
were pushed into the new DSHS license at once — 6,000+ applications landed in the first two weeks of July 2026 (trade and state reporting, October 2026). The queue is the story of the year in this industry.
is what a permitting consultant charges in Denver alone (the Denver association's own figure). Consultants and full-service filers price the confusion; the kit prices the answer at $29.
existed anywhere for the question "my permit is from X — where else can I legally sell?" before this one. Guides are free all over the internet; a computed answer was not.
Questions every operator asks
It depends entirely on your state, and the answer changed in several states in 2026. In Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Ohio your license is now good statewide. In Colorado and Utah, your license travels through a reciprocity filing. In most other states, the honest answer is still no — each county or city permits separately. The free checker answers for your exact pair of places.
A commissary is a permitted facility where your truck is serviced: fresh water, wastewater dumping, cleaning, food storage, and often overnight parking. Most permitting systems require one, and operating without a valid commissary arrangement is one of the fastest ways to get shut down on the spot. The kit includes the agreement template health departments expect to see.
On July 1, 2026, Texas replaced every city and county mobile food permit with one state license from DSHS (HB 2844). One license, per vehicle, good everywhere in Texas. Cities keep their rules about where you may park — they no longer license whether you may sell. Our Texas pages walk the whole transition, including the inspection queue.
Because this market's official pages go stale in public — a major Texas city was still teaching its abolished permit process months after the law changed. A rule without a checked date is a rumor. Every row here is stamped, and every correction we make goes on the public correction log.
No. This is permit information and paperwork organization, in plain words — the rules as published, the steps in order, and the documents to prepare. The issuing office's current page is the final word, and for a fight with a city, a lawyer is the right tool.
Get the FoodTruckCleared Kit — $29
One payment of $29. No subscription. The kit is a web page you can return to and print — Permit Path sheets for all 51 jurisdictions, the Texas transition guide, reciprocity playbooks, the commissary agreement template, inspection checklists, the event pack, and fee worksheets.