How We Verify Every Page

Every load-bearing fact on this site traces to a primary source: the state's statute or administrative code, or the alcohol authority that administers its licenses. This page explains exactly how each page gets made and checked, what "last verified" means and how you can flag an error.

Two independent passes on every state

We research each state twice, in separate passes. The first pass reads the statute, the administrative code and the licensing authority's own fee schedule and application, then writes the facts: the license classes, the quota and control-state status, the fees, the timeline, the application steps, the local approval and public-notice rules, the server-training requirement, the background check and the renewal cycle. A second pass then re-derives the load-bearing facts from scratch, without leaning on the first. Any disagreement gets resolved against the primary source. License brokers, attorney marketing pages and point-of-sale vendor blogs are treated as corroboration only, never as the source of a fact.

What the second pass catches

The independent check is not a formality. It caught superseded and misattributed law in several states before anything published. A few examples from the current sweep:

• Alaska: an older fee schedule under the repealed AS 04.11 was still circulating. The check confirmed those fees were repealed on January 1, 2024 and replaced by the biennial regime under the AS 04.09 rewrite, so the page carries the current biennial figures.
• Arkansas: the state's own early-2025 rulebook still printed the old one-permit-per-person rule. Act 156 of 2025 had already superseded it, raising the cap to three permits, so the page reflects the enacted law rather than the stale printing.
• Illinois: an enrolled-bill reprint showed a cocktails-to-go sunset that the compiled statute no longer carries, because a later act removed it. The page follows the compiled statute, not the reprint.
• Pennsylvania: a widely repeated claim that a bill called "SB 653" created a direct-to-door delivery right does not hold up. Checked against the General Assembly's own record, SB 653 is an unrelated tax bill, so we state the claim nowhere and note the check in the changelog.

When a source will not confirm a figure

Some states do not publish a number centrally. County-set fees in home-rule states, a fingerprint trigger an agency page does not spell out, or a fee schedule caught mid-cycle between a live and an upcoming version all leave a genuine gap. Rather than adopt a broker's guess, the page flags the exact detail where it appears and tells you which office to confirm it with. A gap stated plainly beats a figure we cannot stand behind.

Verified and partial pages

Each state page carries one of two honesty levels. A verified page had every load-bearing fact confirmed against a primary source on both passes. A partial page has one or more details we could not fully confirm; each one is flagged exactly where it appears on the page, phrased as what to confirm with the authority. On this sweep, 39 of the 51 jurisdictions are fully verified and the remaining 12 carry named field-level flags, most often a county-set fee the state does not publish centrally.

What "last verified" means and how often we re-check

The date on each page is the day we last read that page's rules against the source. Liquor rules change by legislative session, so we re-check on a set schedule and whenever we learn of a change, then update the page and log it in the law-updates changelog. The changelog marks a change as in effect only once its effective date has arrived and we have confirmed it against a primary source; an enacted change with a future start date is labeled as pending, never shown as already live.

Tell us if we are wrong

If a rule on any page looks out of date or does not match what your state told you, we want to fix it fast. Report an error here and point us at the source. Getting these pages right is the whole point of the project.

An independent reference project, not a state alcohol agency or law firm. Educational information, not legal advice. Confirm the current rules with your state before you apply.