Richmond —

For decades, the single hardest number in a Virginia mixed beverage license was 45. Restaurants holding a mixed beverage license had to show that at least 45% of their combined food-and-mixed-beverage revenue came from food. Miss it, and you were looking at a license problem, not a bookkeeping problem.

As of July 1, 2026, that flat number is gone. HB 975, carried by Del. Bennett-Parker, replaced it with a tiered system keyed to how much food a venue actually sells in a month.

The three tiers

The requirement now depends on monthly food sales:

Monthly food sales	Food-to-beverage requirement
$48,000 and above	No ratio requirement
$25,000 – $47,999	At least 30% food
$4,000 – $24,999	At least 45% food

There is a carve-out inside the bottom tier. A venue in the $4,000–$24,999 range drops to a 30% requirement if it has fewer than 30 table seats and an occupancy load under 60 people. That is the provision aimed squarely at the small neighborhood bar, the kind of room that has been functionally illegal to operate in Virginia without running a kitchen that loses money.

The seating rule nobody is talking about

HB 975 also added a requirement that gets less attention and will catch more operators off guard: a mixed beverage licensee must maintain as many seats at tables as it has seats at counters.

If you have a 24-seat bar rail and 12 seats at tables, you are out of compliance on that provision regardless of how good your food numbers look. Count your seats before you count your revenue.

What still doesn’t count

Beer and wine sales do not count toward these ratios. This continues to trip up operators who assume a strong wine program helps the math. It does not. The ratio is food against mixed beverages, and a venue can be selling a great deal of alcohol overall while still failing the test on spirits alone.

What to do this month

• Pull your last twelve months of food sales by month. The tier you fall into can change month to month, and so can your obligation.
• Recount your seats. Table seats versus counter seats, as installed today, not as drawn on the original plan.
• Fix your point-of-sale categories. If food, beer, wine and spirits are not cleanly separated in your POS, you cannot prove which tier you are in, and ABC will not take your word for it.
• Reread your license conditions. Local conditional-use permits and lease terms sometimes carry their own food-sales language that HB 975 does not touch.

What comes next

Virginia ABC is required to report implementation data back to the General Assembly by November 1, 2027. That report is the thing to watch: it will tell legislators whether the tiers worked, and it will shape whatever comes after them.

For now, the practical upshot is that a Virginia restaurant doing real food volume has stopped worrying about this rule entirely, and a small bar with a modest kitchen has a path that did not exist a year ago.