Victorian Liquor Licences + New Licence Tracker

Every current liquor licence in Victoria (about 23,000) from the official monthly register that Liquor Control Victoria publishes on DataVic. Each record comes with its trading name, licensee, category, trading hours, patron capacity, address, council, region and lat/long.

Diff mode compares the two most recent monthly files and returns only licences that are new, changed (licensee, trading name, address, capacity, hours or category) or removed. Each changed record lists its field-level from → to values. Example: Jul → Aug 2026 had 259 new, 193 changed and 30 removed licences.

Who it's for

Hospitality suppliers and sales reps (beverage, POS, linen, insurance, security, glassware), market researchers, compliance teams, and AI agents that need a structured lookup of Victorian venues. Run diff mode monthly on a schedule to feed a "new venues" lead list.

Input

Field	Meaning
mode	snapshot (full current register) or diff (changes since the previous month)
changeTypes	Diff mode only: any of new, changed, removed
categories	Substring match on the official category names, e.g. Restaurant and cafe Licence, Late night, Packaged Liquor, BYO Permit (case, accents and licence/license spelling ignored)
councils	Substring match, e.g. Yarra
suburbs, postcodes, regions	Exact match
metroRegional	any / Metro / Regional
nameContains, minPatronCapacity	Optional name and capacity filters
includePostalAddress	Off by default. Many licensees are individuals, so postal addresses are left out unless you ask for them
maxItems	Default 1000; 0 means no limit

Output (one item per licence)

See samples/. Fields: licenceNumber, licensee, tradingAs, category, tradingHours, patronCapacity, streetAddress, suburb, postcode, state, council, region, metroRegional, latitude, longitude, snapshotDate, plus changeType/changes/comparedWith in diff mode and a source attribution block.

Pricing (pay per result)

• Suggested US$0.003 per result in snapshot mode. The full state costs about US$69, a typical council/category slice of under 500 rows costs under US$1.50.
• Diff mode is the high-value product. Charge it as a separate event at around US$0.01 per change record. A month's full diff is about 480 rows, roughly US$5 a month per subscriber.
• Why: the raw file is free, so the price pays for not having to discover and download a new XLSX with a changing filename each month, parse its messy header rows, normalise categories and casing, geocode-join the data and compute the diff. It is priced below the cost of a person doing this by hand (more than 30 minutes a month). Compute per run is small: about 20 s and 2 file downloads of about 5 MB each.

Source and licence

• Data: Victorian liquor licences by location, Liquor Control Victoria, https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/victorian-liquor-licences-by-location. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (DataVic cc-by).
• Attribution included in every record: "Contains information from Victorian liquor licences by location, Liquor Control Victoria, via DataVic, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Not endorsed by Liquor Control Victoria or the State of Victoria."
• Only the official bulk file is used. No scraping. The latest files are found through the DataVic CKAN API. Each file is checked after parsing (at least 5,000 rows, licence number / category / suburb columns filled); if the newest monthly file is missing, malformed or blocked, the actor falls back to the previous month and says so in the log.
• The data is a monthly snapshot. Check the official register before relying on a licence's status. Users are responsible for their own Privacy Act and Spam Act compliance when they contact licensees.

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdir -p storage/key_value_stores/default && echo '{"mode":"diff"}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
python -m src      # output in storage/datasets/default