Is Buying a Restaurant Reservation Illegal? A State by State Status Board

The question almost always arrives backwards. People ask whether it is illegal to buy a restaurant reservation, and the statutes that have passed since late 2024 are, with near total consistency, written about the other side of the transaction: the party that lists, advertises, brokers or sells a table it does not own. Below is the status board as of the date on this page, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with what each measure actually reaches and where it stands. Last verified 24 September 2026, and reservation bills move fast, so treat the legislature's own text as the final word rather than this summary.

Which jurisdictions restrict restaurant reservation resale right now?

Five have enacted something and one has a bill in committee. The effective dates matter more than the headlines, because several of these were reported at signature and then took months to bite.

What does the statutory language actually prohibit?

The drafting is remarkably similar across all six. The prohibited act is listing, advertising, promoting, trading or selling a restaurant reservation through a website or application without a written agreement with the restaurant. New York's Act, which Holland & Knight summarized when it took effect, is the template the others follow: the duty runs to the third party operating the marketplace and to the person supplying the inventory, and the restaurant's written consent is the thing that makes an otherwise prohibited listing lawful.

Read that clause twice, because the whole distinction lives in it. What is being regulated is a secondary market in something the restaurant handed out for free. A diner who opens Resy, finds a Thursday at 6:15, and takes it under their own name has not listed anything, advertised anything or sold anything. There is no transaction for the statute to reach. The same is true if that diner uses software to find the seat, because the regulated conduct is the resale, not the speed.

Is it illegal for me, the diner, to pay for a table?

In none of the five enacted jurisdictions does the penalty attach to the buyer. The exposure sits with the seller and the platform. That is a narrow comfort, though, and worth saying plainly: legality for the buyer is not the same as a good purchase. You still have no issuer standing behind the booking, no transfer mechanism, and no recourse if the host declines a last-minute name change at the door. We go through the practical side of that in should you buy a restaurant reservation, and the market history in what happened to Appointment Trader in NYC.

The restaurant-run exception is real and separate. When the house sells its own seats, a prepaid tasting menu, a ticketed event, or a platform filling tables against a minimum the restaurant agreed to, that is the written agreement the statutes ask for. Money reaching the restaurant is not the thing any of these laws were written to stop.

Is California's AB 1640 in force?

No. AB 1640, carried by Assemblymember Stefani, was pending when we checked, with an Assembly committee analysis dated 25 March 2026 and a proposed penalty of up to $1,000 per violation. It is a bill, not a statute, and you should not plan around it or cite it as California law. If it is enacted, the structure it proposes matches the pattern above: unauthorized listing and sale, restaurant consent as the cure.

Do platform terms say anything different from the law?

Yes, and they are stricter, which trips people up. Resy's terms limit you to not more than one reservation for your personal use during any one mealtime and prohibit running multiple accounts. Those are contract terms, enforceable by account action rather than by a court, and they apply whether or not your state has passed anything. A platform can also restrict automation it has not approved: CNN Business reported on 23 September 2026 that Resy said it "does not currently permit unapproved third-party bots or agents to independently access or interact with the Resy platform." Terms and statutes are two separate rulebooks and you are subject to both.

Where does a booking tool sit against all of this?

SeatSwiper is on the booking side of the line these laws draw, not the resale side. It watches a table you chose on Resy, SevenRooms or OpenTable and books it on your own account, in your own name, for your own dinner, the moment one opens or someone cancels. Nothing is listed, brokered, held for a buyer or transferred, so there is no secondary sale for a resale statute to reach. Pricing is first booking free, then a flat $5 charged only on a booking it actually lands, plus $1 to start a cancellation watch, taken when the watch begins whether or not a seat ever opens, and not covered by the free first booking.

The limits belong in the same breath. It covers those three platforms only, it needs your reservation account connected so it can act as you, it obeys the same one-per-mealtime terms you do, and it can lose a race for a single seat. No tool, ours included, can promise a platform will never take action on an account, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling certainty they do not have. The mechanics are in how SeatSwiper works, and the account question is answered directly in will a reservation service get my account banned.

The one sentence to take away

Every enacted reservation law in the United States targets selling or listing a table, not booking one for yourself, and the two things are not close enough to confuse. If you were weighing a resale listing against simply catching the seat when it returns to the public book, the free routes in free ways to get a hard reservation are the cheaper and steadier answer, and they raise none of the questions on this page.