HB4215

HB4215, effective September 1, 2025, extends Texas’s transportation-network regulatory framework to qualifying delivery-network companies. These are businesses using a digital network to arrange food, beverage or consumer-goods deliveries from restaurants or retailers. A business that only delivers products it produces or stores on its own premises is excluded from that definition. Covered delivery can include attempted deliveries, selecting or collecting items and incidental tasks.

Companies must obtain and maintain a Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation permit and pay an annual fee set by rule to cover administration. The department may not charge a separate fee for each delivery person or vehicle. It may suspend or revoke a company’s permit for violating the chapter.

The law gives the state exclusive regulatory authority over the covered companies, logged-in delivery people and delivery vehicles, including permits, rates and operational requirements, rather than allowing separate local industry rules. It also says they are not common, contract or motor carriers under this provision. This does not exempt anyone from ordinary traffic laws; the underlying Chapter 2402 retains traffic-law enforcement provisions.

Before authorizing a delivery person, a company must confirm the person is at least 18, check the required identification, conduct the specified local/state/national criminal screening and check the national sex-offender website. Intended motor-vehicle delivery also requires a valid Texas or other-state driver’s license and driving-record review. The law bars access for listed convictions within seven years, sex-offender registration, and specified motor-vehicle convictions within the applicable three-year record period. That driving-record threshold includes more than four moving violations, not four. Companies must restrict access on a law-enforcement request or court order.

Companies must adopt a policy prohibiting any amount of intoxication while logged in, post the policy and complaint route on their website or app, and retain relevant complaint records for at least two years. They must also adopt and communicate a nondiscrimination policy covering location or destination, race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability and age. The statute defines sex here as the physical condition of being male or female. Delivery people must comply, and companies cannot add a delivery charge because a customer has a physical disability.

Under the new Texas provision, a delivery person qualifies as an independent contractor if the company does not prescribe working hours or delivery territory, restrict use of competing delivery networks, or restrict another occupation or business, and both sides agree in writing to independent-contractor status. The label alone does not meet those conditions.

Companies must keep records showing compliance for two years. The bill extends existing public-agency confidentiality and security rules to company information, protects a company against specified misuse of required delivery-person information while a public entity holds it, and limits disclosures of customers’ identifying information to consent, legal obligations or the specified service-terms purposes. Customer names may be shared with delivery people to identify or communicate with the customer. Voluntary municipal data-sharing agreements are permitted; public disclosure rules and court-order/subpoena exceptions still matter.