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How we check these facts

General information, not legal advice. Rules change, and counties add their own. Check with your state and county before you start selling.

"Cottage food" is the term most states use for food made in a home kitchen and sold directly to customers. What it covers, and whether your state uses the phrase at all, differs by state.

These guides tell you what you may legally sell out of your own kitchen. That is worth getting right, so here is exactly where the numbers come from, how each one is checked, and what happens when we get one wrong.

Official sources only, and every number linked to its own

Three kinds of source go on these pages, and nothing else does:

No blogs. No aggregator sites, no business directories, and no other people's state-by-state tables. Most of the wrong figures circulating about this subject trace back to one stale official page that everybody copied, and a copy of a copy is how a 2019 number is still being quoted in 2026.

Every figure on a state page is linked to the page it was read from, beside the figure itself, so you can check us in one click instead of taking our word for it. The same sources are listed again at the foot of the page with the agency that publishes each one.

If something cannot be verified from an official source, it does not go on the page. You will read "the department does not address this" and "no cap is stated" in several places. That is not a gap we failed to fill — it is the true answer, and it is far more use to you than a figure we inferred from context and presented as fact.

When two official sources disagree, the newest one wins

A department FAQ can sit untouched for years after the legislature changes the law underneath it. Both pages are official. Only one of them is current.

Texas is the clearest case in the country. Senate Bill 541 raised the annual limit to $150,000, with public health entities required to comply from 1 September 2025. An older state health department FAQ still prints $50,000 — and that is the figure the blogs copied. We publish $150,000, link the enrolled bill text, and say on the page where the $50,000 comes from, because you will find it somewhere and deserve to know which of us to believe.

We read the legislature, not only the department

This one cost us a wrong number on a live page, which is why it is stated so plainly: check the latest completed session's list of enacted acts, not only the statute page. A statute page can lag the act that amended it.

Louisiana is the page that bought the rule. The statute page for R.S. 40:4.9, on the Legislature's own site, prints $30,000 and lists amendments only through Act 357 of 2022. Act 801 of the 2026 Regular Session raised the figure to $100,000, effective 1 August 2026. The statute page lagged its own amending act by three months — and we published $30,000 before we caught it.

That page now carries its correction in the text. We would rather show you where we were wrong than change a number quietly and hope nobody acted on the old one.

A link that works is not a source that says it

A URL that returns 200 proves a page exists. It proves nothing whatsoever about what is on it.

While researching Mississippi we had a state health department URL recorded as the source for the cottage food rules. It answers 200. It renders the Water Supply page. An automated status check would have waved it straight through, and we would have cited a page about drinking water as the authority on selling cakes.

So every source is opened and read, and the sentence on our page has to be findable in it. That is slower than checking status codes. It is also the entire job.

A negative is a claim too, and needs the same proof as a number

"No annual limit." "No license required." "Nothing has changed since 2022." Each of those is a factual claim about a jurisdiction, and each one needs a primary source exactly as a dollar figure does. It is easy to forget, because a negative feels like the absence of a fact rather than a fact of its own.

We learned it expensively. Writing the last group of pages, we had recorded nine jurisdictions as having no 2025 or 2026 enactment. Three of those were wrong. New Hampshire had four 2025 chapters and had removed its cap altogether. Maine had Public Law 2025, chapter 309. Hawaii's rules, recorded as still pending, had already been adopted.

All three were caught the same cheap way. A statute's own history note lists the chapters that amended it, with dates. If the history note stops in 2022 and the law moved in 2025, the note tells you so in one line — and nobody has to guess.

It is also why these pages distinguish "no cap" from "no cap stated". The first means an official source says there is no limit. The second means we read the official sources for that jurisdiction and none of them names a figure. Those are two different situations for you to be in, so we do not print them as the same sentence.

Why you will not read "the only state that..." here

A superlative is a silent claim about every other jurisdiction. "The lowest fee on this site", "the only state that does not require X" — write that on one page and you have asserted something about fifty others, and the next page anyone writes can falsify it without touching the page the claim sits on.

Three of ours were falsified in exactly that way, by pages written weeks later:

All three are corrected. The rule that came out of it is simple: a comparison between jurisdictions is derived from the whole set, or it is not made at all.

One related trap, because it has caught us twice: two states can share a bill number. HB 403 was reported to us as Mississippi's and is Louisiana's. A $250,000 cap was reported as Alaska's and is Wyoming's. A figure that arrives without a link to the enacted text is a crossed state until proven otherwise.

Every page says when it was last checked

At the foot of every state page you will find the words Last verified, a date, and the list of sources the page was checked against. Laws change — several of these changed while the pages were being written — so a page that will not tell you when it was checked is a page you cannot judge. Ours tell you.

What a date cannot do is turn this into legal advice, and it is not legal advice. Counties and cities add rules on top of the state's, and your own situation may turn on something no general page covers. Every page says so at the top, and it means it: confirm with your state department and your county before you start selling.

When we get one wrong

Two things happen. The page is corrected, and the correction stays visible on it — Louisiana's page explains the $30,000 it used to show. A number that changes quietly teaches a reader nothing, and we would rather you knew which of our pages had been wrong than trusted all of them equally.

If you find a mistake, tell us. Email founder@getworknest.com with the official page that says otherwise, and we will either fix ours or explain why we read that source differently. The official page is the part that matters: without it there is nothing to check against, and we are all back to copying each other.

Questions people actually ask

Who writes these guides?

Worknest Business, the company behind the order pages home cooks and home bakers use to take orders. We are not a law firm and these pages are not legal advice. What we do is read the state’s own department pages and statutes carefully, link every figure to where it was read from, and print the date the page was checked.

Why is your figure different from the one I found somewhere else?

Usually because the other page copied a department FAQ that the legislature has since overtaken. Texas is the standard example: an older state health department page still prints a $50,000 limit, and the law has said $150,000 since Senate Bill 541. Open our source link and theirs and compare the dates. The newer official source governs.

Is this legal advice?

No. It is general information, sourced and dated. Counties and cities add their own rules on top of the state’s, and the people to confirm with before you start selling are your state department and your county.

How often are the pages updated?

Each page carries the date it was last verified, and for that page that date is the honest answer. Pages are re-checked when a legislature enacts something that touches them, and whenever a reader shows us an official source that says otherwise. There is no automatic refresh, which is precisely why the date is printed where you can see it.

What does "no cap stated" mean on a page?

That we read the official sources for that jurisdiction and none of them names an annual sales figure. It is not the same as "no cap", which means an official source says there is no limit. If you are anywhere near the point where it would matter, that is the moment to ask your state department directly rather than rely on either reading.

Do you cite other state-by-state guides?

Never. A table somebody else compiled is a copy, and we have no way of telling which of its numbers were read from a statute and which were inherited from the page before it. We go to the department or to the act even when a secondary page would have been quicker.

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