September 30, 20264 min read

California's plastic bag ban is now full. Here's how to ring up the 10-cent paper bag fee correctly

By Yan Payments

What changed

As of January 1, 2026, plastic checkout bags, including the thicker “reusable” plastic bags stores have used for the past decade to get around the earlier bag ban, are no longer allowed at the register in California. Senate Bill 1053 closed that loophole. Covered stores, meaning supermarkets, large retailers with a pharmacy, drug stores, liquor stores, and many convenience stores, can now only offer two things at checkout: a bag the customer brought themselves, or a paper bag sold for a mandatory 10-cent fee.

This is the second act of a law that’s been building for over a decade. California banned thin single-use plastic bags back in 2014 under SB 270, but that law left a gap: stores could still hand out a thicker plastic bag and call it reusable. Most grocery chains did exactly that, and the thicker bags ended up in landfills and waterways at rates not far off the bags they replaced. SB 1053 is the fix for that gap, and it’s a statewide rule, not a patchwork of city ordinances like the earlier bag rules sometimes were.

That fee isn’t a suggestion, and it isn’t something you can fold quietly into your prices to look generous. State law requires it to be charged separately and shown as its own line on the receipt, not bundled into the subtotal.

A worked example

A customer buys $34 of groceries and needs two paper bags. Your receipt needs to show the $34 in merchandise and, separately, 20 cents for the two bags, itemized as a bag charge. It shouldn’t be baked into item prices, and it shouldn’t be waived because the customer is a loyalty member or it’s a slow Tuesday. If that same customer is enrolled in CalFresh or another food assistance program, the bag fee doesn’t apply to them at all, even though everything else about the transaction is identical.

Where merchants get tripped up

A few mistakes show up constantly with rules like this:

Bundling the bag fee into the item price instead of itemizing it. That defeats the point of the disclosure requirement and can be treated as a violation on its own.
Waiving the fee as a promotion, a loyalty perk, or “just this once” for a regular. The law doesn’t allow discretionary waivers outside the food-assistance exemption.
Still stocking the thicker reusable plastic bags because they seem different from the flimsy kind. They’re not. SB 1053 covers plastic film bags regardless of thickness or how many times they’re marketed as reusable.
Forgetting that the paper bags themselves have a content requirement. They need at least 40% postconsumer recycled content now, rising to 50% by 2028, so whatever your supplier is sending you needs to meet that bar too.

Setting up your POS

The mechanics matter as much as the policy here. Your point of sale needs a dedicated bag-fee item, priced at 10 cents, that a cashier can add per bag and that prints as its own line on the receipt, separate from tax and separate from the merchandise total. It also needs to be easy to exempt at the register for a customer paying with CalFresh or EBT, without a manager override slowing down the line every time. If your current setup only lets staff adjust prices manually or lump a “bag fee” into a catch-all miscellaneous charge, it’s worth fixing now rather than after your first receipt gets flagged.

Produce bags are different

Don’t confuse this with the thin bags on a roll in the produce section. Those are compostable plastic bags meant for loose fruit, vegetables, bulk grains, or meat, and SB 1053 doesn’t touch them. The ban is specifically about checkout bags, the ones a cashier hands over to carry purchases out of the store. If your business gives out produce or bulk bags, you don’t need to change anything about those.

Who this hits hardest

Grocery stores, pharmacies, liquor stores, and convenience stores are squarely covered. Restaurants handing out takeout bags fall under a slightly different framework depending on the bag type, so if that’s your business, it’s worth checking whether your specific packaging counts as a “carryout bag” under the law rather than assuming the grocery rules apply exactly the same way.

If you want a hand setting up a proper bag-fee line item and exemption flow on your Clover system, talk to a payments expert, or see what registers and printers we support on our hardware page.

This is general information, not legal advice. Check with an attorney or your local jurisdiction for how SB 1053 and any city-level bag ordinances apply to your store.

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