Both Numbers Are Real

Put yourself in front of a spreadsheet for a fourth Texas location.

You need one number: what it costs to register the shop. It is not a subtle question. It has a printed answer, in a code section, adopted on a date.

Depending on which page answers you first, you will write down $155 or $5,150.

Neither of those is a made-up number. That is the entire problem.

Four figures, four documents

Every price in circulation this morning traces to something real. Here is where each one actually comes from.

$150, and $155 to pay. The registration fee before the current schedule. The $150 figure is printed as the then-current fee in the proposed rules published in the Texas Register on December 26, 2025 — it appears there as the number being replaced. Add the Texas Online fee and the amount payable came to $155.

$20,000. Proposed. Filed December 15, 2025, published December 26, 2025 (TRD-202504633 through TRD-202504639), earliest possible adoption January 25, 2026. It was never adopted at that figure. It is a real number, in a real filing, from a proposal that did not survive contact with the comment period.

$5,000. Adopted. 25 TAC §300.502(g) sets retail registration at $5,000 per retail location, and again at renewal, alongside $10,000 per facility licence under §300.202(c), a $1,000 delinquency fee, $125 for a minor amendment, and no proration. Filed with the Secretary of State on March 2, 2026 (TRD-202601066), effective March 31, 2026.

$5,150. What you actually pay. DSHS publishes the amount payable separately from the rule figure: $5,150 per location for a one-year retail registration, and $10,300 for a one-year consumable hemp product licence, each stated to include the Texas Online fee.

The last two are both current and they are not in conflict. The rule's figure and the amount at the point of payment are different quantities, and the gap between them is a disclosed surcharge. Use each for what it is: $5,000 is what the rule says, $5,150 is what leaves your account. We walked through why that unit matters — per location, not per company, and not prorated — in [Texas Hemp Fees: Why $5,000 Is Per Location, Not Per Company](https://gethempdash.com/learn/texas-hemp-registration-fees-per-location).

The first two are history. They are also still being served as the answer.

The one that should worry you

A legal-information site published on May 15, 2026 states, without qualification: the retail hemp registration costs $155 per location, including the Texas Online processing fee.

May 15 is six weeks after the current schedule took effect. The same page discusses the March 31, 2026 rules by name. It carries no last-updated stamp.

And a compliance-software vendor's Texas guide, last updated August 31, 2026 — with an editor's note reading "As of August 28, 2026" — manages both at once. Its licensing table gives $5,150 per location and $10,300 per licence. Its FAQ, further down the same page, gives $155 and $258. One page, one update, two prices, a factor of thirty-three apart, and no acknowledgement that the two sections disagree.

We asked the underlying question five different ways this morning. Two phrasings returned $5,150. One returned $155. One returned $155 and $258 together. One returned the $20,000 proposal.

Look at what that distribution means. Whether an operator gets this year's number or last year's does not depend on asking well. Both correct answers and both wrong ones came back to plainly-worded questions. It depends on which page happened to answer.

Why the usual tests miss it

[We wrote last week](https://gethempdash.com/learn/ask-it-twice) that you can catch a bad number by asking the same question twice, worded differently, and watching whether it holds still. A rule holds still; a summary of one frequently does not.

That test does not catch $155. Ask ten times, get $155 ten times. It is perfectly stable — because it is not an invention that has to be regenerated each time, it is a fact, sitting on pages that have simply not been touched since it stopped being true.

[The test before that one](https://gethempdash.com/learn/a-deadline-nobody-published) was: find the author. That one does not catch $155 either. The author is right there, named, on a site whose whole business is publishing legal summaries.

So a stale number passes both. It has an author. It holds still. It is checkable. It was true. And it is off by a factor of thirty-three in a line item you are about to commit to a lease against.

This is a different failure with a different shape, and it needs its own question: as of when?

Not "who says so" and not "does it wobble", but: what date does this number belong to, and what document fixes it there. A figure that cannot answer that is not yet an answer. It is a figure.

Even the correction is undated

The most instructive sentence we read this morning is on the regulator's own page.

The DSHS Consumable Hemp Program page states that the consumable hemp product licence fee "has been restored to" $10,000 annually per location plus the applicable Texas Online fee, and that the retail hemp registration "has been restored to" $5,000 annually per location plus the applicable fee.

Restored. That is DSHS's own word about its own fee, and it concedes what the four figures above already tell you: this number has a history, and there was a period when it was something else.

Neither sentence carries a date. The page carries no last-updated stamp. So a reader standing on the regulator's own surface, reading the regulator's own correction, cannot tell from that page when the restoration happened.

We are reporting that and stopping there. We are not going to tell you why the fee moved, what the word "restored" implies about anyone's posture, or what any of it means for how rules are being enforced. Our record holds enforcement posture on the total delta-9 THC threshold as under review and asserts it in neither direction, and nothing read this morning moves that field. Which records are settled and which are open is set out one by one in [Which Texas Hemp Rules Are Unsettled, and Which Are Not](https://gethempdash.com/learn/which-texas-hemp-rules-are-unsettled).

The dating problem is not academic

One sentence on this, because it is easy to file "put dates on things" under research hygiene and move on.

In San Antonio on August 19, a reported defence argument in a smoke-shop case turned on which side of an effective date the alleged conduct fell. Nothing follows from that about how any rule is being enforced, or about anyone's guilt — [a raid is not a rule change](https://gethempdash.com/learn/a-raid-is-not-a-rule-change) and a single case is not evidence about a rule's status in either direction. The narrow point is the only one worth taking: the date attached to a fact was the argument. Not context for the argument. The argument.

What we did to our own work

We run a scoring script over the morning's research so the publishing order is reproducible rather than re-argued each day. It weighs geography, engagement, how recent an item is, and how well our verified record can answer it.

This morning it put a March 27 explainer video at the top of the list, and a June 5 one second — above every primary source read today. Both scored zero on recency. Both won on view counts, because a video carries views and a regulator's fee page does not.

The March video was published four days before the current fee schedule took effect. Its numbers were accurate the day it went up.

So: a ranking tool, written specifically to keep us honest, sorted two out-of-date fee explainers above this morning's primary sources, because it counted the audience and under-counted the calendar. We are leaving that finding in the open rather than quietly reordering the list, and the weighting is now a known problem to fix. It is the same error the rest of this piece is about, and we made it in the machinery built to prevent it.

The habit

When you write a regulatory number down, write two more things next to it: the date it took effect, and the document that fixes it.

"$5,000 per retail location, 25 TAC §300.502(g), effective March 31, 2026" survives being read next year, because a reader can tell instantly whether it is still yours. "$155" cannot be checked, cannot be aged, and will sit in a model until someone pays the other number.

Three extra words. They are the difference between a figure and an answer.

And in the future tense, where it belongs: a federal provision, P.L. 119-37, is scheduled to take effect on November 12, 2026 and will change how the federal definition is measured. It has not done so. Any account describing it as a current requirement is describing a date that has not arrived — which is this same failure, running forwards instead of backwards.

Source: 25 TAC §300.502(g) and §300.202(c); adopted rules filed with the Secretary of State March 2, 2026 (TRD-202601066), effective March 31, 2026. Amount payable as published by the Texas Department of State Health Services. Proposed figures as published in the Texas Register, December 26, 2025 (TRD-202504633 through TRD-202504639), not adopted. Enforcement posture: under review, asserted in neither direction.

The full record set, with each status shown rather than summarised, is at [the Texas Rule Center](https://gethempdash.com/texas-rules).