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🕒 4-minute read
Congratulations, Here’s Your Sticker
California manufacturers have finally received the help they have been waiting for.
Not cheaper electricity or lower taxes on manufacturing equipment. Not faster permits. Not relief from the rising cost of moving goods around the state.
They are getting a logo.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that manufacturers may now apply to display California’s new “Made in California” label. A company qualifies by showing that at least 51 percent of a product’s wholesale value was added through manufacturing, assembly, fabrication, or production in California. Then comes the application, state approval, a licensing agreement, branding rules, and certification renewal every two years.
The fee is waived through the end of 2026. After that, manufacturers will pay between $75 and $500 for the privilege of announcing that they managed to make something here.
It is an almost perfect Sacramento program. California builds the obstacle course. A manufacturer somehow reaches the finish line with an actual product. The state shows up with a commemorative sticker and, eventually, a bill for the sticker.
Perhaps the more informative label would be “Taxed in California.”
The New Program Is Old
One more problem: This supposedly new program is not new.
California enacted the original Made in California program in 2013. By 2019–20, the state’s own annual report [ [link removed] ] showed no active certifications and no applications or inquiries in progress. Three businesses created accounts during the year. None finished applying. The GO-Biz website recorded exactly zero outbound clicks to the program website.
Participation was so low that the program’s only third-party certifier withdrew.
The 2026 version drops some of the old barriers, although Newsom’s announcement understandably preferred “new” to “revived government labeling program that failed the first time.” California’s regulatory explanation [ [link removed] ] calls it what it is: a relaunch of the program enacted 13 years ago.
The Legislature has already written an expiration punchline. If registrations do not increase significantly by 2028, the state should strongly consider ending the program.
This is funny, up to a point. The joke ends where the factory ledger begins.
The Cost Comes First
Start with electricity. Anyone operating industrial machinery has to buy it.
In 2024, California industrial customers paid an average of 21.53 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration [ [link removed] ]. The national average was 8.13 cents. Industrial electricity in California cost roughly 2.65 times the national average.
For a machine shop, food processor, aerospace supplier, or any other energy-intensive business, that difference shows up every month on the electric bill. The logo does not help pay it.
Then there is the equipment. California advertises a partial sales-tax exemption for qualifying manufacturing and research-and-development machinery.
“Partial” is doing important work in that sentence.
Even with the exemption, qualifying equipment remains subject to a tax rate of at least 3.3125 percent, plus applicable district taxes, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration [ [link removed] ]. A qualifying $1 million production machine can therefore generate at least $33,125 in California tax before district taxes are added.
The company pays California for the equipment needed to make the product. It may then pay California again for the label celebrating where the product was made.
The Ledger Keeps Growing
Workers’ compensation adds another burden. Oregon’s latest interstate premium-rate study [ [link removed] ] placed California fourth-highest in the nation, at 170 percent of the study median.
Those costs help determine whether a company hires another worker, adds a shift or puts its next production line somewhere else.
And those are only three entries on the California cost ledger.
None of this includes the state’s 8.84 percent corporate tax, its $800 minimum franchise tax, unemployment-insurance charges and emergency surcharge, diesel excise and sales taxes, daily-overtime and meal-period rules, payroll compliance, PAGA litigation, industrial stormwater fees, air-quality permits, environmental review for qualifying expansions, packaging mandates and, depending on what a company makes, where it operates and how much it emits, the rest of the state and local regulatory apparatus waiting between an idea and a finished product.
A small furniture maker and a semiconductor plant do not face identical obligations. They do not need to. A company can encounter only part of this list and still feel the cumulative weight.
So, Does It Matter?
California remains the nation’s largest manufacturing state by employment. It has world-class universities, enormous consumer and capital markets, major ports, advanced research institutions and a deep pool of skilled workers.
Newsom’s announcement says California manufacturers employ 1.24 million people and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual output. Those numbers belong to the manufacturers and workers who continue producing here despite the costs.
With all of its built-in advantages, California ought to be one of the easiest places in America to turn an idea into a physical product. Sacramento has instead created a marketing program to compensate for a business environment it refuses to confront.
Manufacturers do not need help advertising that they survived California. They need California to improve their chances of surviving.
They have already earned the right to say they made it here. Sacramento should spend less time designing the label and more time making sure there are still products—and manufacturers—to put it on.

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