Yes, food truck sales tax in Los Angeles went up on October 1, 2026. The new rate is 10.25% in the City of Los Angeles, Santa Clarita and unincorporated LA County, and higher where a city adds its own tax.

If your menu prices already include the tax and you didn't raise them that day, the extra tax now comes out of your share of every taxable sale.

What sales tax rate do I charge at each LA County stop now?

From October 1, 2026, the rate is 10.250% in the City of Los Angeles, Santa Clarita and unincorporated LA County; 11.000% in Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Long Beach and San Fernando; 11.250% in Santa Monica, Calabasas and San Marino; and 11.750% in Lancaster and Palmdale, according to the rate table from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA), the state agency you report sales tax to.

Each sale takes the rate in effect at the stop where it happens, whether the tax is included in your menu price or added separately.

The half-point increase comes from Measure ER. Los Angeles County voters approved it on June 2, 2026: a half-cent countywide tax for five years starting October 1, 2026. That half point is what moved the countywide rate from 9.750% to 10.250%, according to Special Notice L-1037.

Measure ER is a district tax, a local add-on that voters approve on top of the statewide rate (under California's Transactions and Use Tax Law, Revenue and Taxation Code section 7251 and following). A handful of cities stacked a new or higher city tax on top of the county's half point the same day. Calabasas and San Marino jumped from 9.750% to 11.250%, so if any of your stops are in those cities, your increase there is three times the county's.

CDTFA's table lists incorporated cities only. Santa Clarita and the City of Los Angeles have no city district tax of their own, so they take the county rate, and a stop in an unincorporated community takes the county rate too. The “before” column above is CDTFA's archived rate list that governed through September 30, 2026. For an exact address, use CDTFA's Find a Sales and Use Tax Rate by Address tool rather than guessing from a neighborhood name.

How do I charge the right rate when my truck moves between cities?

Charge and report the rate of the stop where each sale happens: CDTFA's mobile food vendor guide says you are responsible to collect the district tax, if any, at each location where your sales are made throughout the day.

A lunch service in Santa Clarita at 10.250% and a dinner service in Burbank at 11.000% are two different rates on the same day, on the same menu. One owner described the problem on Square's seller community forum back in 2016:

“I have a mobile food truck and sell in several different cities within my state - all with different sales tax rates. Is there a way to make the change quickly and easily through Square?”

— a food truck owner asking on Square's seller community forum in 2016

The practical setup: save each stop's rate as its own tax in the POS, marked as included in the price, switch it when you park, and tag each sale with the stop, so the POS keeps a stop log: a record of where each sale happened. The first thing I'd check on any truck is the tax rate saved in the POS for each stop, because that one setting decides whether every sale that day is right or wrong. If you'd rather hand off the stop log and the per-stop rates, our food truck accounting team sets that up.

What does the October 2026 rate increase cost a tax-included menu?

Using the formula in CDTFA's mobile food vendor guide (total sales divided by one plus the rate), about 9.3 cents of every tax-included dollar is tax at a 10.250% stop, up from about 8.9 cents before October 1. On $100 of tax-included taxable sales, that is about 41 cents more tax out of the same $100.

The reason the increase lands on you when the price doesn't change is a rule specific to trucks and carts. Under CDTFA Regulation 1603(v) (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 18, § 1603), if a mobile food vendor doesn't add a separate tax amount to the price, taxable sales are presumed to be made on a tax-included basis. No tax line on the receipt means CDTFA treats the menu price as already containing the tax. So when the rate rises and the price doesn't move, the tax slice of the price gets bigger and your slice gets smaller.

Run the formula at 10.250% and $100 ÷ 1.1025 = $90.70 of sales and $9.30 of tax. Here is what that arithmetic does to real numbers:

• Per $100 of tax-included taxable sales at a Santa Clarita, City of LA, or unincorporated stop: tax was $8.88, now $9.30, about 41 cents more, and you keep $90.70 instead of $91.12.
• Per $10,000 at those stops: tax was $888.38, now $929.71, which is $41.33 more tax.
• A $15.00 plate at a 9.750% → 10.250% stop: before, $13.67 was yours and $1.33 was tax; after, $13.61 is yours and $1.39 is tax, so 6 cents less per plate. The tax-included price that keeps your $13.67 at the new rate is $15.07.
• A $12.00 plate at the same stop: your share drops from $10.93 to $10.88, and the break-even price is $12.05.
• Calabasas and San Marino (9.750% → 11.250%): about $1.23 more tax per $100 of tax-included taxable sales. A $15.00 plate keeps $13.48 instead of $13.67, which is 19 cents less, and the break-even price is $15.21.
• A truck with $20,000 a month of tax-included taxable sales, all at 9.750% → 10.250% stops: tax was $1,776.77 a month, now $1,859.41. That is $82.64 more a month, $991.68 over twelve months.

This only touches taxable sales. Under CDTFA Publication 287, the Mobile Food Vendors Tax Guide, hot prepared food, sodas, and food eaten at tables you provide are taxable, while cold food sold to go and to-go hot coffee or tea generally are not. So run the math against your taxable sales, not your total till. If you're not sure which of your items are taxable, our companion guide walks through which menu items are taxable on a California food truck, item by item.

Should I raise my menu prices?

On a tax-included menu, I'd round up: at a 10.250% stop, a $15.00 plate breaks even at $15.07, and $15.25 leaves you 16 cents more than before October 1. Leaving prices where they are means you absorb about 41 cents per $100 of tax-included taxable sales at the county-rate stops, and about $1.23 per $100 in Calabasas and San Marino, for as long as Measure ER runs.

Example: a $15.00 plate at a 10.250% stop

If your customers are price-sensitive and your margins can take a 6-cent hit per plate, absorbing it is a legitimate choice too. What I'd avoid is leaving prices alone without ever checking what that costs over a year. On $20,000 a month of taxable sales it's $991.68, and it repeats every year the rate stays in place.

When does the new rate first show up on my sales tax return?

Under CDTFA Publication 73, the October 2026 return is due November 30, 2026 for monthly filers, and the October–December 2026 return is due February 1, 2027 for quarterly filers, because January 31, 2027 falls on a Sunday.

The rule: your return and payment are due the last day of the month following the close of each reporting period, and if that date lands on a weekend or holiday, it's the next business day.

When you file, you report each sale under the city and county where it happened, straight from the stop log. Two schedules do the splitting, and CDTFA Special Notice L-734 for mobile food vendors describes both: Schedule A splits the district taxes, such as Measure ER's half point, by where you sold, and Schedule B splits your sales by county. If your POS tags each sale with its location, both schedules can be built straight from that log. If it doesn't, you're reconstructing a month's worth of stops by hand at filing time.

What if my POS kept charging the old rate after October 1?

If your prices include the tax, you still owe tax at the new rate for each stop, and the old setting only makes your POS reports understate it. If you add tax at the register, every sale rung at the old rate undercharged the customer, and you owe the difference anyway.

CDTFA's mobile food vendor guide says to use the proper rate for the location where your sales took place to calculate the sales tax included. So if your prices include the tax, report from the correct rate for each stop, not from the POS reports.

If you add tax at the register, Publication 287 says you owe tax on sales of taxable items whether you collect it from your customers or not, so the shortfall comes out of your pocket on the return covering those sales.

Fix the rate in the POS the day you notice; the longer the old rate sits there, the more sales you have to correct by hand.

How does CDTFA check a food truck's sales tax?

It can start from your card processor's records instead of yours. In a 2026 Office of Tax Appeals opinion, Appeal of A. Alcaraz, dba Tony's Catering, issued March 11, 2026, the owner of a food truck in Oxnard, in Ventura County, went into his first audit with only his federal income tax returns and no other books or records.

CDTFA pulled his Form 1099-K data (the form a bank, card company or payment network files to show what it paid a business) and took the sales tax out of those card receipts at the tax rate, the same tax-included division as above. His reported numbers implied card payments were 72.50% of his sales, which CDTFA thought was high for a truck. His truck was one of the 11 food trucks run by Alcaraz Catering, Inc., a company he owns as CEO and sole shareholder, and CDTFA's audit of that company had found card payments were 10.40% of its total sales. OTA said it was reasonable and rational to use the ratio from a similar business operated by the same owner.

For July 2018 through December 2020, CDTFA treated his card sales as 10.40% of his total sales and projected $1,607,396 of total sales. Taking the tax out left $1,491,781 of taxable sales, $1,288,876 more than he had reported for those quarters. With no card data for the first half of 2021, it added its quarterly average of $127,057 for each of those two quarters, for $1,542,990 of unreported taxable sales in all. The bill was $125,485 in tax plus interest and a $12,548.48 negligence penalty.

He appealed, and OTA sustained CDTFA because he had almost no records to support a lower number. Matching returns did not save him: CDTFA had compared his sales tax returns with the gross receipts on his federal returns and found only immaterial differences.

Keep the POS sales reports by stop and your stop log; they are the records that let you answer a projection built from card data. Publication 287 tells vendors to save all cash register receipts, bills, invoices, computer sales logs and menus.

The same records do double duty on the federal side: our receipt-keeping guide for self-employed owners covers what the IRS expects you to keep, and our small business taxes guide for new small-business owners covers the federal returns CDTFA compared his against.

Is food truck catering taxed the same way as curbside sales?

No. The tax-included presumption that covers your curbside menu does not apply when you are selling as a caterer. Under Regulation 1603, a caterer is someone serving meals, food or drinks on the customer's premises, or on premises the customer supplied, and the regulation says the mobile-vendor presumption does not apply to those sales.

A private event where you serve on the customer's property is catering, so an all-in event quote is not automatically treated as tax-included the way your curbside menu is. On an event quote, show sales tax as its own line, figured on the whole catering charge, because under Regulation 1603(i)(3)(A) tax applies to the entire charge made by caterers, including the labor of serving the meals.

What else do food truck owners ask about the new rate?

N&T Tax & Advisory Group works with food truck and cart owners anywhere in California to set each stop's rate, keep the stop log, and check whether a tax-included menu still covers the tax. Book a meeting with our team about your truck's sales tax.