State of Vegan Dining 2026 (edition of September 30, 2026)
US vegan restaurant statistics, edition of September 30, 2026
Washington, D.C. leads the Vegaholic directory with 8.54 fully-vegan kitchens per 1M residents — ahead of Oregon (4.21) and Washington (4.15), while 13 of the 51 states and D.C. have none mapped. 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
- 5,577
- 100% vegan kitchens
- 500
- cities with one
- 199
- states + D.C. with one
- 38/51
Fully-vegan kitchens per capita, by state
In the Vegaholic directory, Washington, D.C. leads at 8.54 fully-vegan kitchens per 1M residents. Only 38 of the 51 states and D.C. have a single one, which is the finding underneath every other number on this page.
| # | State | Per 1M (places)Per 1M | 100% vegan | All listings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Washington, D.C. | 8.54 (6) | 6 | 58 |
| 2 | Oregon | 4.21 (18) | 18 | 183 |
| 3 | Washington | 4.15 (33) | 33 | 358 |
| 4 | New York | 3.47 (69) | 69 | 647 |
| 5 | Utah | 3.43 (12) | 12 | 128 |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 2.68 (35) | 35 | 192 |
| 7 | California | 2.46 (97) | 97 | 978 |
| 8 | Arizona | 2.37 (18) | 18 | 186 |
| 9 | North Carolina | 2.35 (26) | 26 | 153 |
| 10 | Colorado | 2.35 (14) | 14 | 150 |
| 11 | New Mexico | 2.35 (5) | 5 | 32 |
| 12 | Illinois | 2.28 (29) | 29 | 251 |
| 13 | Massachusetts | 1.96 (14) | 14 | 134 |
| 14 | Georgia | 1.88 (21) | 21 | 158 |
| 15 | Rhode Island | 1.80 (2) | 2 | 42 |
| 16 | Vermont | 1.54 (1) | 1 | 16 |
| 17 | Maryland | 1.28 (8) | 8 | 144 |
| 18 | Wisconsin | 1.17 (7) | 7 | 80 |
| 19 | Tennessee | 1.11 (8) | 8 | 47 |
| 20 | Minnesota | 1.04 (6) | 6 | 96 |
| 21 | Kentucky | 0.87 (4) | 4 | 25 |
| 22 | Maine | 0.71 (1) | 1 | 30 |
| 23 | New Hampshire | 0.71 (1) | 1 | 22 |
| 24 | Hawaii | 0.69 (1) | 1 | 63 |
| 25 | Virginia | 0.68 (6) | 6 | 159 |
| 26 | Texas | 0.67 (21) | 21 | 275 |
| 27 | Florida | 0.56 (13) | 13 | 191 |
| 28 | South Carolina | 0.55 (3) | 3 | 81 |
| 29 | Connecticut | 0.54 (2) | 2 | 29 |
| 30 | Missouri | 0.48 (3) | 3 | 49 |
| 31 | Michigan | 0.39 (4) | 4 | 67 |
| 32 | Kansas | 0.34 (1) | 1 | 17 |
| 33 | Ohio | 0.34 (4) | 4 | 129 |
| 34 | New Jersey | 0.32 (3) | 3 | 105 |
| 35 | Iowa | 0.31 (1) | 1 | 8 |
| 36 | Nevada | 0.31 (1) | 1 | 24 |
| 37 | Louisiana | 0.22 (1) | 1 | 23 |
| 38 | Indiana | 0.14 (1) | 1 | 99 |
States with no fully-vegan kitchen mapped are not ranked. Printing13 states tied at zero would imply a precision this data does not have, and it would be wrong as well as imprecise: Vermont sits in that group while Burlington’s Pingala Café describes itself as all-vegan, tagged upstream as merely vegan-friendly. A zero here means nobody has mapped one, not that none exists.
Fully vegan places per 100,000 residents in the Vegaholic directory
Ranked by fully-vegan kitchens per 100,000 residents among places with at least 100,000 residents and at least three fully-vegan directory listings. The table includes only cities with one exact normalized name-and-state match in the Census city/town estimates.
| # | City | Rate (places)Per 100k | 100% vegan | Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Seattle, WA | 3.59 (28) | 28 | 780,995 |
| 2 | Berkeley, CA | 3.29 (4) | 4 | 121,749 |
| 3 | Salt Lake City, UT | 3.21 (7) | 7 | 217,783 |
| 4 | Rochester, NY | 2.89 (6) | 6 | 207,282 |
| 5 | Portland, OR | 2.36 (15) | 15 | 635,749 |
| 6 | Pasadena, CA | 2.19 (3) | 3 | 137,195 |
| 7 | Atlanta, GA | 2.12 (11) | 11 | 520,070 |
| 8 | Garden Grove, CA | 1.74 (3) | 3 | 172,361 |
| 9 | Philadelphia, PA | 1.65 (26) | 26 | 1,573,916 |
| 10 | Worcester, MA | 1.42 (3) | 3 | 211,286 |
| 11 | Pittsburgh, PA | 1.30 (4) | 4 | 307,668 |
| 12 | Richmond, VA | 1.28 (3) | 3 | 233,655 |
| 13 | Baltimore, MD | 1.23 (7) | 7 | 568,271 |
| 14 | Denver, CO | 1.10 (8) | 8 | 729,019 |
| 15 | San Francisco, CA | 1.09 (9) | 9 | 827,526 |
| 16 | Boston, MA | 1.04 (7) | 7 | 673,458 |
| 17 | Gilbert, AZ | 1.04 (3) | 3 | 288,790 |
| 18 | Plano, TX | 1.02 (3) | 3 | 293,286 |
| 19 | Raleigh, NC | 1.00 (5) | 5 | 499,825 |
| 20 | Greensboro, NC | 0.98 (3) | 3 | 307,381 |
This is a Vegaholic-directory measure as of September 30, 2026, not a census of vegan dining: coverage varies by city, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other large cities are undercounted. Census matching covers 1,069 of 1,337 directory cities (80.0%), with 2 ambiguous matches.
Coverage audits
Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle were audited in depth on September 29–30, 2026. Audited cities tend to show more complete listings. This edition is frozen; future editions will be published as new files and will never overwrite it.
Closures confirmed in the 2026 review
125 listings were marked closed by the freshness review ledger, equal to 2.24% of this edition's directory. This is what our checks found, not a census of every restaurant closure in the United States.
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.
| State | Listings (per 1M)All listings | Per 1M | 100% vegan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mississippi | 3 (1.02) | 1.02 | 0 |
| Alabama | 9 (1.74) | 1.74 | 0 |
| Iowa | 8 (2.47) | 2.47 | 1 |
| Montana | 4 (3.52) | 3.52 | 0 |
| Nebraska | 9 (4.49) | 4.49 | 0 |
| Arkansas | 14 (4.53) | 4.53 | 0 |
| Louisiana | 23 (5.00) | 5.00 | 1 |
| Wyoming | 3 (5.11) | 5.11 | 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.
In this edition, 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.
Methodology and sources
- What is counted
- 5,577 active listings in the Vegaholic directory, of which 500 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
- Both state and city denominators use US Census Bureau Vintage 2024 estimates, as of July 1, 2024. State source: US Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 Population Estimates (NST-EST2024-ALLDATA): Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024.
- As mapped on OpenStreetMap
- These are counts of what has been mapped, not a census of what exists. Tagging density varies by region and coverage is incomplete: Los Angeles and San Francisco, in particular, have more fully-vegan places than this directory currently captures. 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 was computed from a committed directory snapshot, generated 2026-09-30T22:08:37.434Z, not written by hand. This September 30, 2026 edition is frozen; later openings, closures, and mapping updates belong in a future edition rather than changing this one.
- 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.
Cite this: Vegaholic, State of Vegan Dining 2026 (edition of September 30, 2026), vegaholic.com/vegan-restaurant-statistics.
Download the data: states (CSV) and cities (CSV), the two ranking tables from this September 30, 2026 edition.
Using these numbers? Please link back to this page so readers can see the method and this edition's figures. Browse the directory by state or all 5,577 listings.