State allergen disclosure laws for restaurants, tracked

Summary table: who has what

As of 2026-05-09. The full breakdown of each row is below the table.

California: ADDE Act (enacted, July 2026)

California's Allergen Disclosure on Dining Establishments Act, Senate Bill 68, was signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 13, 2025. The substantive disclosure requirements take effect July 1, 2026. The law applies to any food-service establishment that operates 20 or more locations under one brand or parent company, with at least one location in California. Each menu item at a covered location must visibly disclose every one of the 9 federal major allergens it contains, at the point where the customer makes their ordering decision. The penalty range cited in California enforcement guidance runs from $50,000 to $5,000,000 per violation, with civil enforcement available to the California Attorney General, local district attorneys, and private plaintiffs under California's consumer-protection statutes.

For a full breakdown of what counts as “visibly disclose,” what counts as a “menu item,” and county-by-county enforcement patterns, see our ADDE Act guide and the point-of-sale disclosure decoder.

New York: pending menu-disclosure bills

New York currently has no statewide law mandating allergen disclosure on restaurant menus. Multiple bills have been drafted across recent legislative sessions, including A6929 in the 2023-2024 session, that would require menu-level allergen disclosure for food-service establishments. As of mid-2026, none have moved out of committee to a floor vote.

New York City does have its own food code training requirement: NYC Local Law 60 of 2009 mandates that at least one supervisor on shift hold a current Allergen Awareness Training credential. Restaurants that fail to produce the credential during inspection face fines starting at $200. This is a training-and-supervision rule, not a menu-labeling rule. Patrons cannot tell from the menu what allergens a dish contains; they have to ask the trained supervisor.

Watch for renewed legislative activity in the 2026-2027 session, especially after California's ADDE Act enforcement begins on July 1, 2026. Plaintiff firms and consumer advocacy groups in New York have publicly cited California's framework as a template; state legislators will face pressure to either match or explain why they aren't.

Illinois: pending menu-disclosure bills

Illinois has had committee-stage menu-disclosure bills introduced over multiple General Assembly sessions, including HB 0156 in the 102nd session and successors in subsequent sessions. None have been enacted. Illinois operators currently have no state-level menu-labeling mandate to comply with.

What Illinois does require is staff training. The 2018 Allergen Training and Awareness in Food Service Establishments Act (Public Act 100-0552) mandates that at least one Certified Food Protection Manager per establishment receive allergen-specific training. The credential is renewed every five years. The Illinois Department of Public Health publishes the approved training providers. This is consistent with the Massachusetts and Rhode Island model: train the staff, post a notice, leave menu disclosure to the operator's discretion.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island: training-only

Massachusetts was the first state to pass a meaningful allergen-awareness law for restaurants, in 2009. Under 105 CMR 590.000 (the state sanitary code's food establishment chapter), every food service establishment must have a Person in Charge who has completed an approved food allergen awareness program, and a poster summarizing major allergens must be displayed in the food preparation area. The poster requirement is satisfied by the Department of Public Health's official poster. There is no menu-disclosure requirement.

Rhode Island followed in 2012 with HB 7798, which added similar training and poster requirements but again stopped short of menu disclosure. The bill's legislative history mentions menu-level disclosure as a future possibility, and Rhode Island legislators reintroduced a broader bill in the 2024 session, but it died in committee. The training-only baseline remains the active rule.

Everywhere else: federal floor only

The remaining 45 states default to the federal baseline. FALCPA (covered here) does not bind restaurants directly, but it does flow through the supply chain: every packaged ingredient your kitchen receives carries a FALCPA-compliant label that you can use to build accurate disclosures. The FDA Food Code 2022, which most states adopt by reference, expects that food-service operators be able to identify the major allergens in any dish on request from a customer. That's a baseline of preparedness, not a labeling mandate.

Several large municipalities have layered local rules on top of state codes: NYC's Local Law 60 (training), Houston, Chicago, and a handful of others have local variants. None of these reach menu-level disclosure today.

Why this matters even where no law applies

Two reasons. First, allergen lawsuits don't need a state-level disclosure law to proceed. Plaintiff firms file class actions under state consumer-protection statutes, common-law negligence, and federal Americans with Disabilities Act theories. The discovery question is the same regardless of jurisdiction: did the operator have a documented process for tracking allergens in their menu, and did they follow it? An operator with a per-version audit trail answers that question with a stack of timestamped PDFs. An operator without one answers it with a story.

Second, the state-by-state landscape is going to consolidate. California's framework will either be copied (likely New York and Illinois first, based on prior patterns of consumer-protection legislation) or ignored (less likely given the political momentum). Operators who treat this as “California's problem” in 2026 are the same operators scrambling in 2028 when their home state passes its version. Building the audit-trail habit now is cheaper than building it under a deadline later.