As a member, you can rest easy knowing that the TRA is working every day to protect and advance your business interests at level of government. You don’t have time to monitor thousands of policy proposals, so we do that for you!

State -

The Texas Legislature only meets for five months every-other year in a regular session to update our state’s laws. In 2025, we delivered another incredibly successful legislative session for the foodservice industry. Our theme Predictability for Today. Progress for Tomorrow. gave us an opportunity to help restaurants stabilize after five years of economic uncertainty while we also laid the foundation for long-term improvements that will make our industry more resilient. 

Working with lawmakers across the political spectrum and many coalition partners, we delivered on all four of our priorities for the 2025 legislative session. We blocked, passed, and rewrote dozens of bills to:

1. Protect foodservice businesses from harmful legislation, including:

  • Problematic food and menu labeling requirements,
  • Tip credit changes,
  • Overly broad junk fee definitions,
  • Data privacy rules that restrict standard business websites, apps, and consumer loyalty programs, and
  • New, costly employment mandates.

2. Save restaurants money, including through reforms on:

  • State and local permits,
  • Health inspection rules, and
  • Business taxes

3. Strengthen the workforce, with improvements on:

  • Childcare for working families,
  • Texas ProStart and other education initiatives, and
  • Middle income housing.

4. Improve restaurant resiliency by ensuring our voices are heard on:

  • Utility reforms,
  • Bridge loan funding to help small businesses recover from a disaster, and
  • Business insurance. 

Learn more about our 2025 Texas legislative session wins and what they mean for your business here. You can also read about our previous state advocacy wins here.


Local -

With 254 counties and over 1,200 cities in Texas, there’s a lot to track at the local level. We monitor and engage on restaurants’ behalf when proposals come up regarding many issues, including but not limited to:
  • Noise and amplified sound ordinances
  • Permitting processes and fees
  • Health inspection rules
  • Patio and parking regulations
  • Temporary events and catering restrictions
  • Mobile food unit regulations
  • Recycling and waste rules
  • Public safety


Federal -

We work closely with our partners—the National Restaurant Association and our 51 sister state restaurant associations from across the US—to improve federal policy. By working together, we have tremendous influence in our nation’s capital.

Our current federal priorities include:

  • Expanding and protecting our workforce by advocating for commonsense immigration and temporary work permit reforms. Immigrants who have been paying taxes and following the law for years should have an opportunity to fill critical vacancies throughout our food pipeline, including in our restaurants.
  • Ensuring restaurant have pro-growth tax and trade policies
  • Advocating for credit and debit card swipe fee relief
  • Protecting the tip credit

We also work closely with the Restaurant Law Center on legal challenges that impact restaurants across the US. For example, in recent years Texas has led the way with National in overturning harmful regulations regarding the tip credit, the joint employer rule, and overtime thresholds. Learn more about this work by visiting our TRA Law Center > Legal Advocacy. 


Next Steps - Get Involved!

If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to our team at [email protected].

Please also visit http://www.restaurantsact.com to learn more about the work we do with the National Restaurant Association and our 51 sister state restaurant associations.

Make sure you’re following our advocacy work in real time by signing up for our weekly newsletter here and following us on social media @TXRestaurants.

If any of these priorities are meaningful to your business, please invest in our ongoing advocacy efforts. Only by working together can we continue to improve the regulatory climate for all foodservice businesses in Texas. Giving with corporate or personal funds is easy; sign up here.