Cottage Food Law — What It Is and How It Varies by State

"Cottage food law" is the informal name for a state statute that lets people sell certain foods they make at home without renting a commercial kitchen, passing a health-department inspection, or getting a foodservice license. Every US state except a handful has one. The specifics are very different state to state. The general idea is the same everywhere: the state has decided that a narrow list of low-risk foods, made in a home kitchen, can be sold directly to the public under lighter rules than a restaurant or a packaged-food company faces.

What counts as "low risk" is where most of the detail lives. A loaf of bread, a jar of jam, a batch of cookies, a bag of granola — these sit outside the refrigerator without spoiling and outside the reach of foodborne illness that meat, dairy, and cooked vegetables carry. Those items are on almost every state's allowed list. A tray of lasagna, a container of potato salad, a bowl of cut fruit — these are "time and temperature control for safety" foods (TCS foods in regulatory shorthand), and most states prohibit them under cottage food rules because home kitchens cannot reliably hold refrigerated temperatures the way a commercial operation can.

So cottage food law is, at its core, a list of foods you are allowed to sell from home plus a set of rules about how you have to sell them. It is not a blanket "you can sell any food from home" license. It is also not the only path — some states layer a second regime on top of cottage food (California's MEHKO program for home restaurants is the most prominent example) that lets you do more, with more oversight.

The modern wave of cottage food laws started in the late 2000s and picked up through the 2010s. Before then, in most states, selling any food to the public from a home kitchen was illegal full stop. States began carving out exceptions for a practical reason: people were already doing it. Farmers markets, church bake sales, cousins-of-cousins birthday cakes, neighbors selling tamales — food was changing hands at small scale constantly, inspector resources could not possibly cover it, and making the whole economy of informal food commerce illegal was both unenforceable and bad politics.

States wrote cottage food laws to draw a line: here is what is clearly allowed, here is what is clearly not, and if you stay on the allowed side you do not need to pretend the transaction never happened. The upside for sellers is a legal path into the market without commercial-kitchen overhead. The upside for states is a framework they can actually enforce when something goes wrong — if a home seller hurts someone with an illegal TCS food, the state can point to a clear rule that was broken. The compromise is that the allowed list is narrow.

Texas's 2025 SB 541 expansion and California's ongoing MEHKO rollout are the most notable recent changes. The direction of travel across states is toward broader allowed lists and higher revenue caps, not tighter ones.

Cottage food law differs across states along three knobs. Understanding these three is most of what you need.

What you can sell. Two models exist. An "approved list" state tells you explicitly which foods are permitted and forbids everything else. An "exclusion list" state tells you which foods are forbidden and permits everything else. Texas switched from approved-list to exclusion-list in 2025, and that change roughly tripled what a Texas cottage operator could offer. The allowed foods in approved-list states tend to be baked goods, jams and jellies, candies, dry mixes, granola, roasted coffee beans, and a handful of others. Exclusion-list states forbid the high-risk TCS categories and let you sell everything else. The label on your state determines how you read the rules.

How much you can sell. This is the revenue cap — the maximum gross sales per year. Caps range from unlimited (several states have removed the cap entirely) to as low as $5,000 in a few of the strictest states. A middle cluster sits between $25,000 and $75,000. Going over the cap in a capped state does not just mean fines; it generally means you need to upgrade to a commercial operation. The cap applies to gross sales, not profit, which matters because a cottage baker selling $8 items at a farmers market hits a $30,000 cap faster than they expect.

Where and how you can sell. Most states allow direct sales at the seller's home, at farmers markets, and at community events. Online ordering is more variable — several states require the transaction to involve in-person pickup or direct delivery by the seller, and explicitly forbid third-party shipping. Selling across state lines is generally not allowed under cottage food law because federal food regulations kick in at the state border. Some states additionally require a specific disclaimer on the label or a specific signage setup at a farmers market. A few permit wholesale into retail stores under additional rules.

Whether you need to fill out paperwork before you start varies as much as the allowed list. The options roughly cluster into three:

Nothing required. A handful of states have no permit, no registration, and no training requirement. You just start selling within the rules. These are the simplest regimes but also often the lowest-cap.

Registration required. A larger group of states requires free or low-cost registration before you start selling. Registration usually means submitting a form to the state department of agriculture or health, listing what you intend to sell, and sometimes attesting that your kitchen meets basic standards. Some registration regimes also require a food-handler certificate — typically a short online course costing $10 to $20 that you complete once.

Permit required. A smaller group requires an actual permit, which often involves an in-home inspection or at least a paperwork-based approval process. Permits usually cost $50 to $150 annually. California's MEHKO permit is the most involved version of this, requiring a substantial application and annual fees, because MEHKO lets you do far more than baseline cottage food (cooked meals for dine-in, for instance).

In some states the requirement flips based on what you intend to sell. Texas, for instance, is no-registration for most cottage food but requires registration if you want to sell refrigerated TCS items, which the 2025 expansion newly permits.

The short version: your state's own cottage food page is the canonical answer, and it is almost always run by either the state department of agriculture or the state department of health. Below is a state-by-state index. Each link goes to a page with your state's current revenue cap, allowed foods, permit or registration requirements, sales channels, and label disclaimer rules.

Use this to answer the basic legality question first. Once you have a clear "yes, this is legal in my state and here is how," the next question is operational — what you actually need to do to get started, price things, take orders, and stay compliant as you grow. The companion guide to how to start a home bakery walks through that piece end to end, with cross-references back to these state pages where a decision depends on local rules.

If you are already selling informally — through social channels, at farmers markets, or within your neighborhood — the legal question is often less "can I sell" and more "am I already doing something that falls under a cottage food rule, and what am I missing?" Two common informal paths worth reading alongside this one: selling food on Facebook Marketplace and selling food on Instagram. Both channels see a lot of cottage food sellers, both have their own policies that interact with cottage food law, and both have specific pitfalls worth knowing about before you scale.

A few things it is worth being explicit about, because they come up often:

Cottage food law does not cover interstate shipping. If you ship a jar of jam across a state line, you step into federal jurisdiction (FDA and USDA, depending on the product). Most cottage food operators stay in-state for exactly this reason.

Cottage food law does not authorize a home restaurant. Serving cooked meals on-site or dine-in requires either a separate home-restaurant permit (like California's MEHKO) or a full restaurant license. Cottage food is for things you package and send the customer away with.

Cottage food law does not replace federal nutrition labeling for interstate commerce, but most state laws do require a specific on-label disclaimer for cottage food products sold within the state ("This product was produced in a home kitchen, not subject to state inspection" and similar variations). The exact wording is state-specific.

Cottage food law does not apply to pet food. Pet-food regulation sits in a different track entirely, and most cottage food laws explicitly exclude pet treats. Check your state separately if you are baking dog treats.

Confirming legality is the first step, not the last. Most home sellers who stall out after starting stall out for operational reasons — lost orders in Instagram DMs, a pricing model that does not cover their actual costs, a channel mix that does not scale past 10 to 15 orders a week. Those are solvable, and they are what the rest of the pillar content here is about.

If you are further along and considering whether the home-food business is worth doing at all compared to a gig-delivery side hustle, the answer depends heavily on what you already own (a kitchen versus a car), what the pay math looks like on your current platform, and whether you want customers or routes. We have specific pieces on is DoorDash worth it, is Instacart worth it, and is Uber Eats worth it that compare each platform against a home food business in honest numbers.