India's food licensing rules just changed. Here is what your business must do.

Perpetual validity on licences and registrations

The older regime forced every Food Business Operator to renew every one to five years. That is over. Once granted, your FSSAI licence or registration is valid until it is suspended, cancelled, or you surrender it yourself. This applies equally to Tatkal licences and registrations.

There is still a catch worth reading carefully. You must keep paying the annual fee. Miss it, and your licence is automatically suspended. You must also continue to comply with hygiene and safety standards under Schedule 4 and related regulations. Perpetual does not mean passive.

You have the flexibility to prepay fees for any number of years, at any time of the year. The licence number itself does not change through category migration.

Revised turnover thresholds for category

FSSAI has raised the turnover bands significantly. The goal is to move a majority of small and mid-sized food businesses out of the Central Licence and into simpler categories with fewer compliance touch points. More than 98 percent of food businesses now sit under State government jurisdiction.

Migration is automatic through FoSCoS based on your self-declared turnover. There is no migration fee, no separate approval from the licensing authority, and no change to your existing licence number. If you are currently on a State Licence and the new threshold pushes you into Registration, the fee already paid gets adjusted against your new annual fee for registration.

If your application is mid-process on 1 April 2026 (document scrutiny, query reversion, or inspection stage), the certificate you finally receive will carry perpetual validity.

Risk-based inspections and audits

FSSAI has moved from a calendar-driven inspection model to a data-driven one. The system considers your enforcement history, surveillance findings, self-compliance tests, third-party audit outcomes and food category risk profile. Businesses handling dairy, meat, packaged drinking water, infant food or fishery products continue to face tighter oversight regardless of size.

The logic is simple. A clean record earns you fewer inspections. A spotty record earns you more. For operators with strong internal systems, this is a material reduction in time spent on regulatory visits.

• Compliance history during enforcement and surveillance
• Self-compliance testing results
• Third-party audit outcomes
• Product category and inherent risk score

Deemed registration for street food vendors

Street food vendors, hawkers, food carts and food trucks already registered under the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 are automatically considered registered under the FSS Act, 2006. This removes a duplicated layer of paperwork and fees for more than ten lakh informal food operators.

The hygiene and sanitary requirements under Schedule 4 of the Licensing and Registration Regulations still apply. Deemed registration is administrative relief, not a relaxation of safety standards.