How to Get a MEHKO Permit in Los Angeles County (2026)

The County publishes its own road map and these are its six steps. Nothing here is a shortcut: the inspection is a person coming to look at your kitchen, and the permit is issued after it rather than before.

Two of those steps are worth reading twice. The $597 goes in with the application and covers the first kitchen evaluation, the application itself and the review of your menu and your standard operating procedures. The $347 permit fee is invoiced after the kitchen passes, and the County's own instructions say not to pay it until the invoice arrives.

The standard operating procedures are the part most people underestimate. The County asks what you will make, how you will handle and store it, how and when you will clean, how you will keep food at temperature including during delivery, what hours you plan to operate and whether people will eat at the house. It is on the County's own form.

You can send the paperwork in over three months rather than all at once, but nothing is scheduled and no permit is issued until all of it is in. Before any of it, the County's own checklist says to do two things that are nothing to do with the government: If you rent, read the lease for anything restricting a home-based business. If you have an HOA, check that it allows a MEHKO. Neither of those is overridden by anything below.

The County charges three fees and only two of them apply to everybody. $167 an hour is for a site evaluation after you change the menu or the equipment, which is not part of getting started.

The subsidy is the thing to act on. LA County is waiving the $597 application review fee for up to 1,000 permittees, first come first served, and it is available through December 31, 2026 or until the money runs out. The conditions are the County's own: The operation is not in Pasadena, Long Beach or Vernon. Annual net revenue is under $50,000, which the page defines as earnings after expenses. You have not received a MEHKO subsidy before. You apply for it on the permit application rather than separately.

One thing to be careful about if you read around: the County's own instructions PDF carries an earlier end date for that waiver, and the live program page carries the later one. The live page is what the County publishes today.

A MEHKO is a restaurant with a ceiling on it. The ceiling is three numbers, and the one that catches people out is the weekly figure rather than the daily one: 30 meals a day is only 90 across a week, so hitting the daily limit on 3 days uses the whole of it.

$100,000 in verifiable gross sales a year, which is the figure LA County publishes. State law adjusts it annually for inflation, so keep your own records and ask the County what the current ceiling is before you get near it.

Commercial equipment is not required, which surprises people. The County says so outright: your own kitchen is the kitchen, and what it asks is that the equipment is clean, stored properly and working. What it does require is a 10:bc rated fire extinguisher for grease fires, readily accessible. and a a first aid kit.

Most of this list is the kind of thing anybody would guess. Two of them are not, and both have cost people money.

The delivery rule is the first. You cannot put a MEHKO on a third-party delivery app: the food goes out with you or with somebody in the operation who holds a food handler card. The County's FAQ carries one exception, where the delivery is for an individual who has a physical or mental disability. You may still take orders through a website or an app, which is a different thing from having that app deliver.

The sign rule is the second, and it is narrower than it sounds. No sign anywhere on the property, and that is absolute. Advertising everywhere else is fine, and the County says what an advertisement should carry: the name of the agency that issued the permit, the permit number, the words "Made in a Home Kitchen", in a clear, visible font.

The County reviews an application within 20 business days. That is the only timeline it publishes, and it is a review rather than a permit: after it comes scheduling an inspection, the inspection itself, any corrections, the invoice and then the permit in the mail.

So there is no official figure for the whole thing, and the County says as much: its FAQ answers how long the process takes by saying it depends on how complete the application is and whether the kitchen passes. Anybody quoting you a number of weeks is quoting their own experience rather than a published standard.

What is published is the other end of the clock. Permitting opened on November 1, 2024 and the County started enforcing against operating without a permit on January 1, 2025.

What nobody publishes is what the wait is actually like, so one applicant wrote theirs down for us: how Take N' Taste got its MEHKO permit in Burbank, including the city's half, which took longer than the County's. That is one business rather than a standard.

California created MEHKOs first and left it to each health jurisdiction to opt in. AB 626 (2018) amended the California Retail Food Code to define a microenterprise home kitchen operation. AB 377 (2019) added that the governing body of a city or county designated as the enforcement agency may authorize the permitting of microenterprise home kitchen operations by ordinance or resolution. The LA County Board of Supervisors did so on May 14, 2024, and the program has no end date: the ordinance states when it starts and nothing about when it stops.

As of November 7, 2026 the County's own published list carries 504 permitted MEHKOs, across 104 different place names. 151 of them were permitted in the program's first twelve months and 343 in the twelve after that. The County has to add a new permit to that list within fifteen business days, so it is the closest thing to a live count anybody publishes.

This is the question people ask second, and the answer is better than most expect. A city or a county cannot prohibit a MEHKO, require a permit to operate one, require the property rezoned for it, charge a fee for it or impose any other restriction on it in a residential dwelling for zoning purposes. That is state law, and LA County wrote it into its own ordinance rather than leaving it implied.

The County went further on its own land: a permitted MEHKO is not a restaurant as the County Code uses the word, and it is exempt by name from the County's home-based occupation standards. And operating one does not change what the home is for state housing law or for local building and fire codes.

What a city does still control is everything around the cooking: noise, parking, traffic, litter, how you get rid of fats and grease, and the business license. Those are not the permit and they are not zoning, and complaints about them go to your city's code enforcement, or to County Public Works on unincorporated land.

The two things that can genuinely stop you are private rather than public. If you rent, read the lease for anything restricting a home-based business. If you have an HOA, check that it allows a MEHKO. Nothing read here says the zoning rule above reaches a lease or an HOA.

The County's own MEHKO checklist says to contact your local jurisdiction about any local permitting you need before you operate, and names a business license as the example. That is the whole of what the County says about it, so the second half of this answer comes from each city rather than from one place.

On unincorporated county land there is no city to ask, and the answer there is a question rather than a yes or a no. The Treasurer and Tax Collector licenses about 110 specific business activities in the unincorporated areas. Its list has no home-based category, and nothing it publishes says whether a home kitchen is one of them, so ask the Treasurer and Tax Collector rather than assuming either way.

The County publishes its own list of every MEHKO it currently permits, and its ordinance makes it keep that list current. On November 7, 2026 the list carried 504 permits across 104 place names. The first one started on November 13, 2024. The County began issuing them on November 1, 2024.

Most of it is recent. 151 of the permits in force today started in the program's first twelve months and 343 in the twelve after that, and the busiest single month so far is October 2026, with 50.

Los Angeles has the most by a distance: 151 permits, 30.0% of every MEHKO in the county. Palmdale and Lancaster are next, with 22 and 16.

The County writes a postal place rather than a city, so these are not city limits. North Hollywood (7) and Van Nuys (7) are inside the City of Los Angeles and are rows of their own, which means the city's real total is higher than the row that carries its name.

The table runs to 14 places rather than 10 because 9 of them have 7 permits each. Cutting a tie at ten would drop places with the same figure as the ones above them, and the only thing deciding which is the alphabet.