Vegan restaurant statistics, by state

Washington, D.C. leads the country with 7.36 fully-vegan kitchens per 1M residents — ahead of Oregon (4.49) and New York (3.73), while 15 of the 51 states and D.C. have none at all. This page counts vegan kitchens — not restaurants that will make you something without cheese, but places with no animal products in them at all — as mapped on OpenStreetMap.

How we counted, in one paragraph. We take every restaurant in our directory, keep only the ones whose entire menu is plant-based, and divide by each state’s population from the US Census. We deliberately do not rank by how many vegan-friendly restaurants a state has, because that number can be run up by a single enthusiastic map contributor — and in our own data, it has been, twice. These are counts of what has been mapped, not a census of what exists, so read a low number as possibly meaning “nobody has mapped it yet”.

listings: 5,686
100% vegan kitchens: 481
cities with one: 202
states + D.C. with one: 36/51

Fully-vegan kitchens per capita, by state

Washington, D.C. leads at 7.36 fully-vegan kitchens per 1M residents. Only 36 of the 51 states and D.C. have a single one, which is the finding underneath every other number on this page.

US states ranked by fully-vegan kitchens per million residents
#	State	Per 1M	100% vegan	All listings
1	Washington, D.C.	7.36	5	59
2	Oregon	4.49	19	189
3	New York	3.73	73	671
4	Utah	3.51	12	128
5	Washington	2.94	23	353
6	North Carolina	2.49	27	162
7	California	2.46	96	994
8	Arizona	2.42	18	188
9	Colorado	2.38	14	151
10	New Mexico	2.36	5	33
11	Illinois	2.15	27	254
12	Pennsylvania	2.08	27	198
13	Massachusetts	2.00	14	135
14	Rhode Island	1.82	2	42
15	Georgia	1.72	19	161
16	Minnesota	1.22	7	97
17	Wisconsin	1.18	7	80
18	Maryland	1.13	7	147
19	Tennessee	1.12	8	47
20	Kentucky	0.88	4	26
21	Maine	0.72	1	30
22	New Hampshire	0.71	1	23
23	Hawaii	0.70	1	64
24	Texas	0.69	21	280
25	Virginia	0.69	6	163
26	Florida	0.62	14	197
27	South Carolina	0.56	3	84
28	Connecticut	0.55	2	29
29	Missouri	0.48	3	52
30	Michigan	0.40	4	67
31	Kansas	0.34	1	17
32	Ohio	0.34	4	136
33	New Jersey	0.32	3	105
34	Nevada	0.31	1	24
35	Iowa	0.31	1	8
36	Indiana	0.15	1	101

States with no fully-vegan kitchen are not ranked. Printing 15 states tied at zero would imply a precision this data does not have — they are in the deserts section below, which is the honest way to say it.

Bar chart: the ten US states with the most fully-vegan restaurants per million residents, led by Washington, D.C. at 7.36. — Free to reuse with credit to Vegaholic and a link to this page. The chart regenerates from the live directory, so save a copy if you need the figures to match your publication date.

Cities with the most fully-vegan kitchens

Absolute counts here, not per capita — we cite state populations and do not have municipal ones, and an invented denominator is worse than an honest whole number.

Read as fully-vegan kitchens / all listings. The gap between the two is the point: a city can carry hundreds of vegan-friendly listings and very few kitchens, and the two facts mean different things to someone deciding where to eat.

The vegan deserts

The other end. These are states with the fewest listings of any kind per 1M residents — not just no fully-vegan kitchens, but barely a vegan-friendly menu between them.

US states with the fewest vegan listings per million residents
State	All listings	Per 1M	100% vegan
Mississippi	3	1.02	0
Alabama	9	1.76	0
Iowa	8	2.49	1
Montana	5	4.41	0
Nebraska	9	4.55	0
Arkansas	14	4.56	0
Louisiana	23	5.03	0
Wyoming	3	5.14	0

This is the one ranking on the page built from total listings, and the direction of the error is why that is safe: the tagging problem described below can only add listings, so a state that still reads as a desert on inflated numbers is one for certain.

Why not just count restaurants?

Because the obvious ranking is wrong, and we can show you exactly how.

Our backbone is OpenStreetMap, where a restaurant tagged diet:vegan=yes means you can eat vegan here — not this kitchen is vegan. That is a useful tag and an honest one. But a single diligent mapper can tag every restaurant in their town, and when they do, a most-vegan-restaurants ranking crowns a place that has no vegan restaurants at all.

As of today, 2 towns in our own top fifteen by raw listing count have zero fully-vegan kitchens:

Champaign, IL — 59 listings, and zero fully-vegan kitchens.
Simi Valley, CA — 51 listings, and zero fully-vegan kitchens.

On raw counts those towns outrank Austin, Denver and Salt Lake City. Ranking that way would have been easy, and it would have been debunked by the first person who phoned a restaurant. Counting kitchens instead is not a disclaimer — it is a metric no amount of enthusiastic tagging can move.

Method

What is counted: 5,686 active listings in the Vegaholic directory, of which 481 are marked 100% vegan — an entirely plant-based menu, no animal products anywhere in the kitchen. The rest are vegan options or vegetarian, and are counted only in the “all listings” columns.
Population: US Census Bureau, Vintage 2023 Population Estimates (NST-EST2023-POP): Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023. Estimates are as of July 1, 2023.
As mapped on OpenStreetMap: These are counts of what has been mapped, not a census of what exists. Tagging density varies by region, and under-tagging is real: San Francisco’s vegan scene is far larger than its fully-vegan tag count suggests. Read the tables as a floor rather than a measurement, and read a low number as possibly meaning “nobody has mapped it yet”. Listing data is from OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License, plus our own curated and reader-submitted listings.
Freshness: Every figure on this page is computed from the live directory when the page is built, not written by hand. Last generated August 27, 2026. Numbers move as restaurants open, close and get mapped, so a figure quoted from here should carry the date you took it.
Corrections: If a kitchen is missing, mislabeled or closed, tell us and we will fix the record: suggest a restaurant or report a problem from any listing page.

Using these numbers? Please link back to this page so readers can see the method and the current figures. Browse the directory by state or all 5,686 listings.