Texas bars just had their first billion-dollar month. Most owners won't feel it.

Editor's note (August 13, 2026): Tax filings are living records — venues amend past returns, and the Comptroller revises its data accordingly. Since this article was published, May 2026 filings have been revised downward and currently total $994.3 million. The figures below reflect the data as originally published. We report what's filed; the ledger keeps breathing.

Texas bars, restaurants, hotels and stadiums sold $1,000,573,373 worth of liquor, beer and wine in May 2026. That's the first time monthly mixed-beverage receipts have crossed a billion dollars in the nineteen years the Comptroller has published this data. The previous record was May 2025, at $964.3 million.

It's a real milestone. It's also, if you own one of these places, probably not what your P&L looked like.

The record is a volume story

Statewide sales rose 3.76% year over year. The number of venues reporting sales rose 3.5%.

That's nearly the whole explanation.

The average Texas venue sold $126 more in May 2026 than in May 2025. The median venue gained $663. A 2.7% bump on the median is about what you'd expect from menu prices alone — the same drinks, priced a little higher.

We checked whether the big rooms were skewing this. They aren't. Drop the top 100 venues by sales — every arena, every resort, every stadium concession — and the picture barely moves: average up 0.5%, median up 2.7%. Same story.

Texas didn't sell more per bar this year. Texas has more bars.

Underneath the calm number, a lot of churn

A 3.76% gain sounds like a slow, steady year. The movement beneath it wasn't slow at all.

Among established venues — at least two years of history and at least $50,000 in the month a year ago — 2,918 venues declined year over year, giving up $65.5 million between them. The median decliner was down 10.6%. A quarter of them were down more than 20%.

Separately, 2,106 venues that reported sales in May 2025 reported nothing at all in May 2026. Some of those are closures. Some are permits changing hands, or ownership restructuring, or a place that simply didn't file. The data can't tell you which. But it's a lot of lights going out.

Against that, roughly 280 new licensees start reporting every month. The net was positive. The gross was brutal.

Half the money is made by one venue in eight

Here's the thing that reframes every other number in this report.

Of the 20,402 venues that reported sales in May, the top 2,423 — about 12% — generated half of the state's alcohol revenue. The bottom half of the venue population, more than 10,000 licensed places, accounted for about 10% of the total.

The top 25 venues alone did $40.3 million.

Globe Life Field in Arlington sold $4.4 million by itself — about 60% more than the next venue on the list, Minute Maid Park concessions in Houston at $2.9 million. Moody Center in Austin came third at $2.5 million.

This is why "Texas bar sales hit a record" is a slippery headline. The aggregate is dominated by a few dozen enormous rooms whose fortunes have very little to do with a neighborhood bar in Abilene. When those rooms have a big month — a playoff run, a festival, a convention — the whole state's number moves.

It also explains why the fastest-growing venues in Texas this year are almost entirely arenas, amphitheaters and event spaces. Dickies Arena, the Zone at Kyle Field, the AT&T Center, Colonial Country Club during tournament week. Those are calendar events, not business trends. We looked hard for a list of ordinary bars posting big year-over-year gains and mostly found buildings with seating charts.

Where growth is actually broad-based

Aggregate to the ZIP code and something more useful appears. One venue can't carry a whole ZIP — and where we saw one trying, we excluded it. Every area below cleared three tests: at least ten venues reporting in both years, at least $500,000 in the base month, and no single venue responsible for more than half the area's dollar gain.

That last filter did real work. It removed a quarter of the ZIPs that would otherwise have made the list.

ZIP codes rising fastest, May 2025 → May 2026

The two Dallas entries and the Houston one are the ones to watch, because they're big bases growing fast — that's harder than a small ZIP doubling. The Design District went from 45 reporting venues to 57. The Heights went from 93 to 111. Eighteen new licensed places in one Houston ZIP code in a year is a district filling in.

At the city level, Abilene is the cleanest growth story in the entire dataset. Up 15.9%, and its largest venue accounts for only 13.7% of the gain — meaning it's genuinely spread across the market, not one big opening. Both of its main ZIP codes show up independently on the ZIP list. Guitars and Cadillacs, Cork & Pig Tavern, and the Blue Barrel Bar & Grill all cleared $130,000 in May.

Cities rising fastest (20+ venues, $1M+ base, same single-venue guard):

Georgetown added sixteen licensees — the largest venue-count increase of any city on the list, which tracks with everything else happening in Williamson County. Fort Worth deserves a mention too: only 8.2% growth, but on a $42 million base, that's $3.4 million in new monthly revenue from an established market.

On the other side, 26 ZIP codes and 5 cities declined by these same standards. We're not naming them. A venue's numbers are its own; a neighborhood's numbers belong to every business and property owner in it, most of whom had nothing to do with the decline. The ZIP declines totaled $8.9 million, with a median drop of 8.9%.

What opened

764 new licensees started reporting in the last six months and have at least two months of sales on the books. Here are the largest by May 2026 revenue.

You'll notice there's no growth column, and that's deliberate.

A venue's first reported month is almost never a full month. A place that opens on the 22nd files nine days of receipts. Plenty of operators soft-open for a few weeks — friends and family, limited menu, half the taps working — before they ever call it a grand opening. Then the opening itself often draws a crowd that never comes back at quite that volume.

We looked at the shape of this across every venue that opened since 2015. The typical first month lands around 70% of where the venue eventually settles. Months two and three actually run slightly above the eventual normal — that's opening buzz. By month four, the median venue is right at its stable run rate.

So a percentage change calculated against a new venue's first month isn't a business story. It's a calendar artifact. We'd rather show you what these places are doing now and let you judge.

One more note on this list: we pulled two venues off it before publishing. The White Elephant Saloon in the Fort Worth Stockyards and Tannahill Tavern next door both appeared as brand-new licensees with first reports in April 2026. Neither is new — the White Elephant has been filing continuously since 2007. Both had simply been issued new permit numbers. More on that in a separate piece, because it turns out to be happening across the state.

What we're watching in June

June 2026 data hadn't fully landed when we ran these numbers, so everything here is May. A few things worth checking when it does:

Whether the billion holds. May is a strong month — graduations, Memorial Day, the start of patio season. June should be comparable. If receipts fall back below a billion, the record was seasonal. If they don't, something more durable is happening.

Whether the churn continues. Nearly 3,000 established venues down year over year is the number we'd most like to see improve.

Whether the Heights and the Design District keep filling in. Eighteen and twelve new licensees in a single year, respectively. That pace either continues or it was a wave.

All figures are gross beverage receipts as reported to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Sales figures represent alcohol only, not food. "Venues" means active mixed-beverage permits reporting non-zero receipts. May 2026 is the most recent complete reporting month; June 2026 filings were still incomplete at publication. You can look up any venue, city, ZIP code or county in Texas on this site, free.