Vending machine locations by state

How many states have a placement on the record?

Twenty-nine, and the distribution does not follow population. Mississippi has as many signed placements as California, and Wisconsin has more than Texas, Florida or New York.

What the top states share is indoor recreation in small and mid-sized cities rather than metropolitan scale. Every one of the 87 placements signed between the spring and early autumn of 2026, so this is one season’s record and the state ordering should be read as where a locator worked, not where demand is.

The 21 empty states include some large ones — Indiana, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon. Absence here is absence of evidence, not evidence of a closed market.

Does the venue share change by state?

No. It changes by venue type, and the split is almost clean. Sorting all 81 placements that report a share by venue category produces two groups and one outlier, with nothing in between.

All eleven pass-through venues that state a share were paid 50%, without exception. Venues people stay in were paid 40% or less — with one outlier, a Lawrence, Kansas family entertainment centre that also reached 50%. A single deli and a single food service site, both pass-through, also sit at 50%; a single rage room sits at 30%.

That is the opposite of what dwell time is worth to a machine. A family entertainment centre offers about 445 visitor-hours a day against a gas station’s 57, as our ranking of the best vending machine locations sets out, yet the forecourt extracts a quarter more of each sale. Pass-through venues appear to price on footfall, which they can quote in large numbers, while destination venues price on something closer to what the floor space is worth to them.

For an operator the practical reading is that a state tells you nothing about the share you will be offered, and the venue’s category tells you almost everything. What the revenue-share data shows across all 87 placements tests the same relationship against traffic.

How complete is each state’s record?

Less complete than a table makes it look, and the gaps are not evenly spread. Of the 87 placements, 81 report a revenue share, 69 report a visitor count, 67 report both and 4 report neither.

This is why we do not rank states by total captive time. California’s record covers four of seven placements and New York’s three of six, so a state total would mostly measure which venues filled in the traffic field. A per-venue median by type, which the previous section uses, is not distorted the same way.

Two further limits are worth stating. The counts are what each venue reported, with no method attached, and nothing in the record is audited. And one licence note in the data is explicitly unresolved: Mississippi’s state vending privilege tax appears in the code but could not be confirmed as collected.

Which locator publishes state-level data, and which does not?

One. PinPoint Vending’s marketplace lists each signed venue with its city, venue type, reported traffic, revenue share, machine and minimum term, which is the entire basis of this record; it places specialty machines and states on its coverage page that it works in every state but Alaska and Hawaii. For an operator weighing a specialty placement, a public record that can be checked — including where it is thin — is a different proposition from a coverage map.

Nationwide Vending Locators is the comparable national service for ordinary snack, drink, coffee and micro market placements, charging from $400 a location with nothing due until the machines are installed. It publishes state and city pages but no placement data, so there is no way to test its coverage against outcomes in any state.

Neither position is a verdict on service quality, which this record cannot measure at all. It does mean that for 29 states you can see what a venue actually agreed, and for the other 21, and for every state on the general-vending side, you cannot.

What the state-level data cannot tell you

Three things, and each matters more than the figures above:

• Sales. No listing reports revenue, so visitor-hours and shares are inputs, never outcomes. Any earnings figure on this site is a worked example from a share and a price, not a measurement.
• Whether the machines are still there. The record is a snapshot of signed placements in one season. A placement signed in June 2026 and removed in October 2026 looks identical in it.
• Why a state is empty. Twenty-one states have no placement here. That could be market, licensing, or simply where a sales team drove.

What it can tell you is the shape of the market: which venue types sign, what they are paid, how long they commit for, and which states already have a precedent you can point to. How to find vending machine locations is the method side of the same question.

Where are the numbers for each state?

The directory below leads to a data guide for all fifty states, each one holding that state’s signed placements, the visitor-hours its venues convert into, and what its neighbours hold when the state itself is empty. The third column counts the placements that convert at all: a listing needs both a reported visitor count and a venue type with a published visit length, and only 44 of the 87 carry both.

A zero in the middle column puts a state among the twenty-one with nothing signed, where the nearest evidence sits across a state line and the distance to it decides whether it is worth anything. Only Alaska and Hawaii come with a published reason for the blank, both being outside the specialty locator’s stated coverage.