AGCO liquor licence lookup, and how to read the status.

Two official routes, and what each gives you

AGCO’s how-to page for looking up a licence status says anyone can look up a licence in iAGCO, and no iAGCO account or access code is needed. You open the iAGCO portal, scroll to Search for Licences/Permits/Authorizations/Registrations on the home page, and click Search. The page is written around horse-racing licences, but it describes the portal’s general search. Its advice is that the most effective way to find one licence is to enter the licence number in the Number field. A name search can return a long list, so check you are reading the right one, and a search with more than 200 results returns a “Too many results found” message that asks for more search terms.

The second route is bulk. AGCO’s data inventory lists a Liquor Sales Licences dataset, described as every establishment in Ontario issued a liquor sales licence from January 2018 to present, including manufacturer’s tied house establishments, as a CSV file. The inventory says AGCO’s open datasets are made available under an open government licence and does not name the version, so this page counts rows and republishes none of them.

Open the iAGCO licence search ↗ Open AGCO’s data inventory ↗

What the open data file contains

The file has one row per licence with these columns: Licence Number, Licence Type, Legal Entity Name, Premises Name, Street Address, City, Province, Postal Code, Endorsement(s), Effective Date, Issue Date, Expiry Date, Deemed to Continue Until and Licence Status. Because it runs from January 2018 to the present, it keeps licences that have since expired or been revoked. The column that separates the live from the historical is Licence Status, so filter on it before you count or quote anything.

Worked example: reading the October 26, 2026 file

The file was last modified on October 26, 2026 and has 24,647 rows: 24,219 liquor sales licences and 428 manufacturer’s tied house licences. By status, 17,569 rows are Active (71.3%), 6,112 are Expired (24.8%), 572 are Deemed to Continue (2.3%), 388 are Revoked (1.6%) and 6 are Suspended. Those add up to 24,647. Roughly one row in four is history.

Now the awkward value. All 572 Deemed to Continue rows have a printed expiry date earlier than the file date, and each carries a Deemed to Continue Until date; 192 of them run to 2028. One row has a printed expiry of 2024-12-31 and a continue-until date of 2028-12-31. Read at face value, the printed expiry is 664 days before the file date, which would suggest an expired licence, but the status says otherwise. Enter that status and those two dates in the tool above to see the reading it gives. The Active rows behave as you would hope: none has an expiry date before the file date.

Reading each status

Active means the file shows a current licence on the day it was published, which is not a live check. Expired is covered by AGCO’s renewal guide: if the renewal application is not received by the expiry date the licence expires and the holder can no longer sell or serve liquor, and expired liquor licences cannot be renewed. Revoked licences are not valid, and the Liquor Licence and Control Act, 2019 prohibits selling or serving liquor without a valid licence. Suspended is shown without a reason or an end date.

Deemed to Continue is the one to be careful with. The same renewal guide describes a Renewal Confirmation Notice, issued when the application and fee arrive on or before the expiry date, that lets the licensee keep operating until the renewed licence arrives. The pages read for this guide do not say that this notice is what produces the Deemed to Continue status, so that link is an inference and is marked unverified. If a decision rides on it, ask AGCO.

Licence numbers

In the file, liquor sales licence numbers are LSL followed by digits, and 420 numbers start LSLTH, the prefix seen on manufacturer’s tied house licences. AGCO does not publish this as a rule, it is a pattern in one dataset, and other AGCO licence types use other prefixes. The checker above tests for that pattern only and cannot tell you whether a number was ever issued.

Method

The checker applies two things in your browser. The number test matches LSL or LSLTH followed by 1 to 9 digits. The status reading is a fixed text keyed on the status you pick, with the day count worked out from your device’s date and the dates you type. The counts above come from the October 26, 2026 file, counted once with the percentages calculated from them. Nothing you type is sent to our servers and nothing is looked up.

What this does not cover

• Whether a specific licence is valid right now. Use iAGCO or contact AGCO.
• Licence types other than liquor sales, such as manufacturer’s, delivery and convenience or grocery store licences, which have their own datasets.
• The legal effect of Deemed to Continue, which the pages read do not define.
• Conditions, inspection history or any compliance record for a premises.
• Individuals. This page copies no names, addresses or licence rows.

Sources

• AGCO, How to Look Up a Licence Status (iAGCO search, no account needed, 200-result limit) (retrieved October 2026)
• AGCO, Data Inventory (Liquor Sales Licences dataset, open government licence) (retrieved October 2026)
• AGCO, Liquor Sales Licences open data file (counted October 26, 2026) (retrieved October 2026)
• AGCO, Section 8: Liquor Sales Licence Renewals (retrieved October 2026)
• AGCO, Find a licensed alcohol retailer (retrieved October 2026)