CA Cannabis Licenses - California DCC Commercial, Cultivation & Manufacturing Register

The California Dept. of Cannabis Control (DCC) publishes the full state cannabis license register as open data - every license ever issued under the three authorities that merged into DCC in 2021, refreshed nightly and served directly from the state API. This actor turns that register into a charged-per-record, searchable lookup.

Built for: cannabis-industry due diligence - verifying an operator's license status, screening suppliers / business partners / acquisition targets, storefront & delivery footprint research, cultivation-license research by county, and state-level market sizing.

What it covers

~20,877 licenses across all three licensing authorities:

Authority	Code	Covers	Licenses
Bureau of Cannabis Control	BCC	commercial storefronts, delivery, distributors, microbusinesses, testing labs	6,037
CalCannabis Cultivation	CCL	cultivation (outdoor / indoor / mixed-light / nursery / processor...)	13,282
Manufactured Cannabis Safety Branch	MCSB	manufacturers (Types 6, 7, N, P, S), testing labs	1,558

Status mix (live): Active 7,600 / Expired 9,010 / Surrendered 2,124 / Canceled 1,589 / Revoked 325 / Limited Operations 183 / Suspended 44. Active by category: Cultivation 4,429 / Commercial 2,729 / Manufacturer 442.

Each record is a full license profile: license number, status + status date, term (Annual / Provisional / Interim), exact license type + category, designation (Adult-Use / Medicinal / both), issue + expiration dates, business legal name / DBA / owner(s) / structure, premise county (street / city / ZIP / coordinates where the state publishes them), and business email + phone (~99-100% populated). Every license carries the source's nightly refresh stamp.

Location privacy is per authority: the state withholds street address and coordinates for cultivation (CCL) and manufacturing (MCSB) licenses - those rows carry the premise county only (still with full business email + phone + owner). Storefront (BCC) rows carry street address and coordinates on roughly a third of licenses. Filtering by county works across the whole register; filtering by city / ZIP / coordinates only returns storefront licenses that carry them.

Typical questions

• "Is this dispensary's license active right now?" (license-number lookup, any era / status.)
• "Show the cultivation licenses of every grower in Humboldt County - active and history."
• "How many Active retail storefronts are there in Los Angeles County?"
• "Find a manufacturer whose license was revoked or surrendered."
• "What's the Adult-Use vs. Medicinal split, by county?"
• "Screen this business name / owner across all three authorities."

Inputs

Input	What it does
licenseNumber	exact license number -> a single license, any era / status (e.g. C10-0000001-LIC, CCL18-0000004)
keyword	business-name substring (legal name + DBA + owner)
status	exact set: Active / Expired / Surrendered / Canceled / Revoked / Limited Operations / Suspended (blank = all)
authority	CCL / BCC / MCSB
typeCategory	Cultivation / Commercial / Manufacturer (mirrors authority)
designation	Adult-Use / Medicinal / Adult-Use and Medicinal
term	Annual / Provisional / Interim
county / city / zipCode	premise location filters (county covers all licenses; city/ZIP only hit storefront rows that publish them)
aggregate / groupBy	one summary row per group with a count - status / authority / typeCategory / designation / term / county
maxResults	cap records (default 250)

Default run = the first 250 licenses in the register (page-1 order - the storefront block, not sorted by recency; no status default, so precise lookups of Expired / Revoked / older licenses are never shadowed). Fast enough for the daily auto-test. For a full scan, set maxResults to 0 or turn on aggregate.

Low cost

From $0.001 per record - billed only for the rows you use, with a per-run charge cap so a broad query can't surprise-bill.

The state's license API looks filterable but silently ignores every filter - status, authority and even the page-size arguments are no-ops, so the only honest way to read it is a full paginated snapshot (84 pages) pulled fresh every run and filtered locally. That snapshot unifies California's three legacy licensing regimes (the storefront bureau BCC, the cultivation branch CCL, the manufacturing branch MCSB) into one schema, with one junk status row normalized out and cultivation / manufacturing rows' withheld street addresses handled explicitly. Every pull is integrity-checked against the register's known shape (total count band, Active-count band, per-authority floors), so a degraded source fails loudly instead of returning bad data.

Source

• DCC Cannabis License Search - official public license search over the same register.
• License data is DCC's own published register; status reflects the state's record as of the nightly refresh.