Public Record Feeds

How do I get a list of new California ABC license applications by county?

California ABC's free new applications report, at abc.ca.gov, covers the whole state, one report date at a time, with no county filter. Download each date's report as a CSV and keep the rows carrying your county's two digit code.

Step by step

  1. Open the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control's new applications report and choose a date with its date picker. The page shows that date's report, for the whole state.
  2. Choose Download Report (CSV). The file holds the whole report for that date, with every column, including the county code, in a column the page hides. The box that filters the rows as you type does not change what is downloaded. Download Print View (PDF) gives the first eleven columns. The PDF has no County column, but each Geo Code in it starts with the county's two digit code.
  3. Keep the rows whose County column holds your county's code. Neither the report nor ABC's License Lookup glossary says what the code means. ABC's list of retail licenses by geocode, in its license counts for fiscal year 2016-17, shows each county's geocodes starting with that county's two digit code, with the counties in alphabetical order, from 01 for Alameda to 58 for Yuba, so Los Angeles is 19.
  4. Repeat for each date in the week. ABC publishes a report on business days and on some weekends, so covering a week means choosing each of its seven dates in turn and downloading each one that has a report.

Each row gives the license type as a code with no description, and marks nothing as on-sale. ABC's list of license types gives the description for each code.

The Status column, and PEND

The report's second column is Status. ABC's License Lookup glossary, its list of the terms its License Lookup uses, defines Status as "The legal standing of the license" and lists PEND as Pending. Every application this site has stored from the reports dated 6 July to 25 September 2026 has the status PEND, so on those reports the column tells no application from another.

Following the report

ABC's site-wide header, on the report page too, has a Subscribe link. It signs you up for ABC's news and events mailing list, whose topics include news and press releases, industry advisories and licensing announcements, and none of them is this report.

Doing all of this yourself costs nothing, and the report page asks for no sign-in.

To have one county's applications sent to you instead, see the weekly file for one county. It is a different set from ABC's report. Each Monday's file holds one county's applications from the week of reports before that Monday, names the county, gives each license type ABC's description, and marks four of ABC's on-sale license types, 41, 42, 47 and 48. It leaves out any application listed under its primary owner's name, because it has no trading name or its trading name is the owner's name, when that name reads as a person's name or as the names of two or more people.