What Virginia ABC actually fines you for, and what it costs
The first-offense penalty schedule is public, specific, and almost nobody in the industry has read it. Twenty-six violations, the suspension days and the civil charge attached to each.
Virginia publishes exactly what a first offense costs. It sits in the Administrative Code at 3VAC5-70-210, it is specific down to the dollar, and in our experience almost no operator has read it until the day they need to.
Here it is in a form you can actually scan.
The first-offense schedule
Each violation carries a suspension length or a civil charge. The figures below are for a first offense.
The expensive ones: $2,500 or 25 days
- Sale of beer, wine or mixed beverages to a person at least 18 but younger than 21
- Allowing consumption by a person at least 18 but younger than 21
- Sale to an intoxicated person
- Allowing consumption by an intoxicated person
Four violations, all $2,500 or 25 days, and all four are things a single distracted bartender can do on a Friday night.
$1,500 or 15 days
- Aiding and abetting the purchase of alcoholic beverages by a person at least 18 but younger than 21
$1,500 or 10 days
- After-hours sales or consumption
- Sale of alcoholic beverages in an unauthorized place or manner
- Failure to remit state beer or wine tax, where the deficiency has been corrected
- Wholesaler sale of beer or wine in an unauthorized manner
- Wholesaler sale of beer or wine to an unauthorized person
$1,000 or 10 days
This is the long tail, and it is where ordinary, unglamorous sloppiness lives:
- Keeping unauthorized alcoholic beverages on the premises, taxes paid
- Allowing an intoxicated person to loiter on the premises
- No designated manager on the premises
- Designated manager not posted
- ABC license not posted
- Inadequate illumination
- Not timely submitting a report required by statute or regulation
- Person younger than 18 serving alcoholic beverages, or younger than 21 acting as bartender
- Consumption of alcoholic beverages in an unauthorized area
- Removal of alcoholic beverages from an authorized area
- Failure to obliterate mixed beverage stamps
- Employee on duty consuming alcoholic beverages
- Conducting an illegal happy hour
- Illegally advertising happy hour
- Unauthorized advertising
$750 or 10 days
- Invalid check to a wholesaler or to the Authority
Read that long tail again
Nine of those $1,000 items are not judgment calls. They are housekeeping.
ABC license not posted. Designated manager not posted. No designated manager on the premises. Inadequate illumination. Not timely submitting a report. Each of those is a thousand dollars, and each is fixable in an afternoon by walking your own building with a checklist.
An operator who would never dream of serving a minor can still lose a thousand dollars because a license fell off the wall behind a coat rack during a renovation and nobody put it back.
Employee on duty consuming alcoholic beverages deserves its own mention, because it is a policy problem rather than a facilities problem, and because “the kitchen has a shift beer” is a widespread and expensive tradition.
Server training reduces some of it
The regulation provides for reduced penalties on violations involving underage sales, underage consumption or intoxicated persons when the licensee provides certified alcohol server training.
That is the four most expensive line items on the schedule. If you are not running certified training, you are paying full freight on exactly the violations most likely to happen to you, and you are declining a discount the Commonwealth has already written into the rules.
What happens after the citation
Enforcement runs through Virginia ABC special agents, who hold statewide police authority and work out of nine regional offices plus a satellite. Violations surface through scheduled inspections and through complaints, which any member of the public can file.
Once a violation is alleged, the process runs roughly like this:
1. Consent settlement. ABC proposes a written offer. You can admit the violation and accept the penalty. Accepting waives your right to a hearing and to appeal, which is the trade you are making for certainty and speed.
2. Docketing. If there is no settlement, the matter goes on the docket, the official schedule of hearings before an Administrative Law Judge. You get written notice of a pre-hearing conference and a formal hearing date.
3. Negotiation. You can still settle. ABC’s Office of Legal Counsel handles those conversations.
4. Pre-hearing conference. Before an ALJ. Both sides identify witnesses and materials. Note carefully: continuances require a written request with substantiated reasons, and needing time to hire an attorney does not qualify. If you wait until the notice arrives to find counsel, you may be going ahead anyway.
5. Formal hearing. The evidentiary proceeding, before an ALJ, usually at ABC headquarters or a regional office.
6. Initial decision. Written findings and penalty, mailed to the parties.
7. Appeal to the Board. A $50 filing fee plus transcript costs. The Board’s final decision is the Authority’s last word, and from there it goes to circuit court.
The part operators get wrong
Hire counsel at the citation, not at the docket. The rules say plainly that hiring delays do not buy you a continuance.
A consent settlement is a real decision, not paperwork. You are trading your appeal rights. Sometimes that is right. Make it deliberately.
Decisions are public. ABC publishes dockets and final board orders, and they are subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Your outcome is on the record, and so is your competitor’s.
What to do with this
Print the $1,000 list and walk your building. License posted and current, designated manager posted and present, lighting adequate, staff ages verified against duties, reports filed on time, no shift beers behind the line.
That walk takes twenty minutes and covers most of the schedule.
Then look at whether your server training is certified, because that is the only line in the regulation that gives you money back on the violations you are most likely to face.
None of this is legal advice, and a live enforcement matter belongs with an attorney immediately, not eventually. The schedule above is the first-offense schedule; repeat violations are handled differently, and the Board is not obliged to land exactly on a scheduled number. Read the regulation itself before you rely on any figure here.
