San Antonio Bar and Restaurant Revenue
Every dollar of alcohol sold by every permitted bar and restaurant in Bexar County, by month and by ZIP code, from Jan 2007 to Jul 2026: 235 complete months and $11.79 billion in reported receipts from 4,634 businesses. It is the only public record that measures commercial activity in this city at neighborhood scale, monthly, going back nineteen years.
The clearest thing in nineteen years of this data is what did not happen. Between Feb 2020 and Apr 2020, reported receipts fell from $60.7M to $3.0M. Over the same two months the number of businesses holding a permit and filing a return went from 1,213 to 1,221. The revenue vanished and the businesses did not, at least not yet and not on this record. A dataset that only counted openings and closures would have shown almost nothing.
Nineteen years, month by month
Two charts, one shared timeline. They are drawn separately on purpose: putting dollars and venue counts on two axes of one chart is what makes this comparison unreadable. These are nominal dollars. Nothing here is inflation-adjusted, so part of the long rise is prices rather than trade, and the line should not be read as growth on its own.
Where the money is, by ZIP code
The 12 complete months from Aug 2025 to Jul 2026. Average per venue is shown because a ZIP with more bars will report more money, which is not the same as its bars doing better.
- under $2.7M
- $2.7M+
- $5.5M+
- $10.2M+
- $25.5M and up
- withheld
| ZIP | Venues | Receipts | Average per venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 78205 Downtown | 200 | $160.9M | $804k |
| 78215 Pearl / Government Hill | 76 | $59.0M | $777k |
| 78216 North Central / Airport | 108 | $45.9M | $425k |
| 78212 North Side | 97 | $40.7M | $419k |
| 78209 Alamo Heights area | 88 | $38.2M | $434k |
| 78256 Northwest Side | 32 | $37.0M | $1.2M |
| 78258 Stone Oak | 63 | $35.5M | $563k |
| 78257 La Cantera & The Rim | 64 | $34.2M | $535k |
| 78249 Northwest Side | 60 | $32.1M | $535k |
| 78232 North Side | 70 | $29.7M | $425k |
| 78251 West Side | 45 | $28.8M | $640k |
| 78261 Far North Side | 5 | $25.5M | $5.1M |
| 78245 Far West Side | 42 | $21.1M | $503k |
| 78230 Medical Center area | 54 | $21.0M | $388k |
| 78219 East Side | 12 | $18.9M | $1.6M |
| 78229 Medical Center | 44 | $14.5M | $329k |
| 78238 West Side | 38 | $13.4M | $353k |
| 78223 Southeast Side | 49 | $13.3M | $272k |
| 78217 Northeast Side | 42 | $13.0M | $311k |
| 78233 Northeast Side | 32 | $11.4M | $355k |
| 78253 Far West Side | 32 | $11.0M | $343k |
| 78254 Northwest Side | 22 | $10.6M | $484k |
| 78023 Helotes | 17 | $10.2M | $603k |
| 78247 North Side | 26 | $10.2M | $392k |
| 78231 North Side | 11 | $10.0M | $913k |
| 78210 Southeast Side | 32 | $9.2M | $287k |
| 78214 South Side | 26 | $7.8M | $301k |
| 78213 Northwest Side | 26 | $6.8M | $260k |
| 78227 West Side | 25 | $6.4M | $255k |
| 78218 Northeast Side | 25 | $6.2M | $247k |
| 78248 North Side | 12 | $6.0M | $503k |
| 78224 South Side | 15 | $5.9M | $394k |
| 78204 Southtown | 24 | $5.8M | $241k |
| 78202 Central San Antonio | 16 | $5.7M | $356k |
| 78250 Northwest Side | 17 | $5.5M | $324k |
| 78148 Universal City | 13 | $5.2M | $403k |
| 78207 West Side | 19 | $4.9M | $259k |
| 78201 Deco District | 27 | $4.5M | $168k |
| 78240 Northwest Side | 27 | $4.5M | $167k |
| 78154 Schertz | 19 | $4.2M | $222k |
| 78221 South Side | 15 | $3.9M | $262k |
| 78235 JBSA (South) | 7 | $3.4M | $485k |
| 78015 Fair Oaks Ranch / Boerne | 5 | $3.1M | $626k |
| 78255 Northwest Side | 6 | $3.1M | $519k |
| 78259 Stone Oak area | 14 | $2.9M | $207k |
| 78208 Northeast Side | 8 | $2.7M | $340k |
| 78222 Southeast Side | 16 | $2.5M | $159k |
| 78109 Converse | 13 | $2.1M | $160k |
| 78228 West Side | 18 | $2.0M | $111k |
| 78237 West Side | 11 | $1.2M | $113k |
| 78260 Far North Side | 5 | $1.1M | $227k |
| 78211 Southwest Side | 11 | $1.1M | $97k |
| 78101 St Hedwig / Adkins | 6 | $875k | $146k |
| 78239 Northeast Side | 6 | $839k | $140k |
| 78263 Southeast Side | 9 | $801k | $89k |
| 78242 Southwest Side | 8 | $549k | $69k |
| 78225 Southwest Side | 6 | $472k | $79k |
| 13 ZIP codes withheld (fewer than 5 venues each, so the total would be one identifiable business) | 32 | $13.0M | withheld |
Withheld ZIP codes are still counted in every citywide total on this page. They are removed as rows, not from the data. One of them is not a San Antonio ZIP at all: 77063 is in Houston, and it carries 68 filings that the source records under Bexar County with a San Antonio city name. It is the only ZIP in this dataset outside the 78xxx range.
What San Antonio drinks
- Liquor 55% $6.47B
- Beer 32.6% $3.83B
- Wine 12% $1.41B
Computed over 99.8% of dollars. 862 filings reported a total with no drink breakdown at all ($23.7M), and cover charges are $54.1M, too small a share to draw honestly as a segment.
The mistake this dataset invites
Bexar County is county 015 here, not 029. The Comptroller numbers counties alphabetically, so Bexar is 015. Query this dataset with 029, which is Bexar's actual federal FIPS code and the obvious thing to reach for, and you get Port Lavaca, Port O'Connor and Seadrift. That is Calhoun County, two hundred miles away on the coast. There is no error, no warning and no empty result: just a complete, plausible dataset for the wrong place.
Source. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts, read through the State's own API and rebuilt monthly. Fetched 27 August 2026. Aug 2026 is excluded: it held 8 filings against a monthly median near 0, because returns are still arriving. Charting it would show a collapse that is only reporting lag.
Share it with someone who argues about which part of town is booming.
Read this before you read the numbers
This dataset is unusually good and unusually easy to misuse. Both are worth knowing before you quote it.
What this is
Gross receipts reported to the State by every holder of a TABC mixed beverage permit in Bexar County: bars, restaurants, hotels, clubs and stadiums. 270,430 monthly returns from 4,634 businesses since Jan 2007, taken from the Texas Comptroller’s own API and republished exactly as filed.
What it is not
Not profit, not total restaurant sales, and not a census of restaurants: a venue without a mixed beverage permit never appears, so absence here is not evidence a business does not exist. No figure is smoothed or inflation-corrected, so a 2007 dollar and a 2026 dollar sit side by side in the chart.
What April 2020 actually looked like
In Feb 2020, the bars and restaurants of Bexar County reported $60,682,757 in sales across 1,213 permit holders. Two months later, in Apr 2020, they reported $2,987,421.
That is a fall of 95.1%. Over the same two months the number of businesses holding a permit and filing a return went up, to 1,221.
Those two facts together are the most useful thing in this dataset, and neither is visible alone. Revenue alone shows a catastrophe; open businesses alone shows almost nothing happening. On the same timeline you see the actual shape: the businesses were still there, still permitted, still filing, and reporting almost no sales. That is why the two charts are drawn separately rather than stacked on one pair of axes. Dollars and business counts are different units, and a chart with two y-scales lets whoever drew it decide how dramatic the comparison looks by choosing where the axes cross.
It is also worth knowing what the recovery does not tell you. A permit that stops filing leaves this dataset silently, and a new permit at the same address arrives as a different business. The venue line is not a count of survivals, and this record cannot tell you how many places open in Feb 2020 are the same ones open today.
The mistake this dataset invites
Four ways to be confidently, invisibly wrong with these numbers.
Bexar County is not 029 here
The State numbers counties alphabetically, so Bexar is 015. Query with 029, Bexar’s actual federal FIPS code and the obvious thing to reach for, and you get Port Lavaca and Seadrift: Calhoun County, on the coast. No error, no warning, just a complete and plausible dataset for the wrong place.
The newest month is a stub
Returns keep arriving for months after a period closes, and the most recent month in the raw feed held a tiny fraction of a normal month’s filings. Chart it and you have drawn a collapse that is entirely an artefact of when you looked. This page excludes any trailing month still filling in, and says which one it dropped.
A quiet ZIP is one business
Six ZIP codes here have had exactly one permit holder in nineteen years, and one of the six is not in San Antonio at all: 77063 is a Houston ZIP the source files under Bexar. Publishing a total for any of them publishes one identifiable company’s revenue. Every ZIP with fewer than 5 reporting venues is withheld, currently 13 of them, with their dollars kept inside the citywide totals so nothing silently disappears.
It is not a denominator
Receipts measure commercial activity, not people. Dividing anything by them, crime especially, reproduces the exact error that makes downtown look like the most dangerous place in Texas. What this data can honestly do is show why that denominator fails: 78205 alone reports $160,882,579 a year from 200 venues.
How this was built
Every figure is a grouped aggregate computed by the State’s own API and reconciled before publication. Nothing downloads the underlying rows, which matters because the platform silently caps a grouped result at a thousand rows unless you tell it otherwise, and a cap like that does not announce itself.
Two independent reconciliations run on every rebuild: the citywide total must equal the sum of the monthly series, and the per-ZIP window must equal the same months in that series. If either disagrees by more than a rounding margin the build publishes nothing and the previous good copy stays put. Every number in this prose reads from the same file as the charts, through a shortcode, so the essay cannot drift out of agreement with the data. Last rebuilt 27 August 2026. The CSV and the documented JSON API are linked from the panel above, and the API’s quality endpoint returns the county-code trap, the disclosure floor and the reporting lag as structured data.
Other San Antonio tools
Same method, a different public record. Each one states what its record cannot answer.
Crime Map Building Permits Bar & Restaurant Revenue Aggressive Driving Trail Accessibility License Plate Readers Data Centers Data Center Zoning 311 Response Times Data Center Corroboration Data Center Environmental Record Bond Projects Council District Lookup Sheriff Response Times County Capital Projects Police Response Times Missing Children Records
All 17 are free, with no signup and no email wall, and the public API behind them needs no key.
Who publishes this
These tools are built and maintained by BrandShyp LLC, a San Antonio software firm. We sell data, software and accessibility work to public agencies and are seeking state and local government contracts. Small business certification with the South Central Texas Regional Certification Agency is in process. We hold no City of San Antonio contract.
No client, agency or sponsor funds, reviews or approves any of these tools, and nothing on these pages is a solicitation. Every figure comes from the public record named below, which is linked and can be queried without us.
Corrections. If a number here disagrees with the record, write to Justice Harker at [email protected] with the figure and the source that contradicts it. Corrections are made on the page, and what changed is noted there rather than replaced silently.