Cannabis compliance
California § 15044 readiness checker
Check a proposed or existing system against the surveillance requirements the Department of Cannabis Control sets for a licensed premises. It reports what the regulation states and where a described system falls short of it. It is not an inspection and not a legal opinion.
CAL. CODE REGS. TIT. 4 § 15044
· VERIFIED 25 AUGUST 2026
· NOT LEGAL ADVICE
· RUNS IN YOUR BROWSER
· COMMERCIAL ONLY
Checker · Cannabis
Dispensary camera requirements checker
Compares a described system against the minimums stated in California Code of Regulations, title 4, section 15044. It reports what the described system does not cover. It never returns "compliant" — that is an inspection, not a form.
Result
Your result will appear here.
Every assumption this tool makes
- 90 days retention, and the five named areas, are taken from California Code of Regulations, title 4, section 15044, verified against the regulation text on 25 August 2026.
- It never returns "compliant". It reports which stated minimums a described system does not meet — a comparison you can check yourself against the regulation.
- Cultivation is out of scope and is refused rather than answered, because the retail-side minimums would give a cultivation site a false pass.
- It cannot see placement, image quality, field of view or lighting , which is what an inspector actually looks at. A system can satisfy every line and still be inadequate.
- 1280 × 720 minimum resolution, 15 fps minimum frame rate and 24-hour continuous recording are taken from the same section, verified on the same date. A system exactly at 1280 × 720 or exactly at 15 fps meets the stated minimum; below it does not.
- There is no such thing as a Department-approved camera vendor. The regulation names none, so the tool says so on every result. The obligations sit with the licensee, not the installer.
- Point of sale is not tested as a section 15044 requirement. The text lists categories of area, not POS by name. That misattribution is in wide circulation and is not repeated here.
- No fine, penalty, enforcement amount or inspection-failure statistic appears anywhere in this tool , because none appears in the regulation text.
- Regulations change. Confirm against the text in force when you install.
The requirement operators miss
Entrances recorded from both indoor and outdoor vantage points
Of everything in § 15044, this is the one that most often turns up short on an existing premises.
The regulation lists five categories of area that must be recorded, at § 15044(a)(1)–(5):
Areas where cannabis is weighed, packed, stored, loaded or unloaded for transportation, prepared or moved within the premises.
Limited-access areas.
Security rooms.
The area storing the surveillance storage device, with at least one camera on its access points.
Entrances and exits — recorded from both indoor and outdoor vantage points.
That last phrase does a great deal of work. An entrance covered only from inside does not satisfy it, and interior-only coverage is exactly what a general-purpose retail system tends to have. Meeting it changes the camera count and the exterior containment on almost every site, which is why it is better to find in a readiness check than at inspection.
The storage-device requirement is worth noticing too: the system has to watch its own recorder. A premises can meet every other line and still have no camera on the door to the room the footage lives in.
The technical minimums
Minimums, not targets, and they interact
The regulation states these as minimums. A system meeting them exactly meets them exactly, with nothing in hand for the day a camera is replaced with a different model or a scene gets busier.
Continuous recording, 24 hours a day. A system cannot meet the requirement by recording only on motion or only during opening hours. This is the line that most often makes a storage figure impossible.
Minimum resolution 1280 × 720 pixels and minimum 15 frames per second. Both drive storage upward at the same time as the retention rule does.
Minimum 90 calendar days retention. Ninety days of continuous recording is a very different quantity from ninety days of event clips, and it is the figure that sizes the whole design.
Time measured per US NIST standards. A drifted recorder clock undermines footage as a record even when the footage exists.
A failure-notification system telling the licensee when the system is interrupted or fails. In practice this is the difference between discovering an outage on the day it happens and discovering it when footage is requested.
Copies provided to the Department on request, within the time specified. Footage has to be retrievable and exportable by your own people, not merely present on a disk.
You can work the storage arithmetic for a 90-day window with the storage calculator, which takes the bitrate from your own camera documentation, not assuming one.
The carve-out, and how narrow
Cultivation-only means exclusively cultivation
The requirement does not apply to a premises authorised exclusively for cultivation. That word is the whole of it. A microbusiness is not covered by the carve-out, and neither is a mixed site that does anything beyond cultivation. Do not assume it applies without checking the authorisation itself.
Verified as of 25 August 2026 against the regulation text. This is a readiness check and a summary, not legal advice and not a substitute for reading the regulation. If you are making a decision on any of it, check the current text or have your counsel do it.
There is no such thing as a Department-approved camera vendor. The license obligations sit with you as the licensee, not with your installer, and any integrator claiming DCC approval is describing something that does not exist. What we can do is design to the requirements — see dispensary and cannabis security for how they shape an actual system, and there is a dated printable summary in our free resources.
Where an existing system falls short, the assessment and the remediation order are what a CCTV service and repair visit produces, and a new design is under commercial camera installation.
Two boundaries, as on every page here. We work on commercial premises only and not on private residences. And we do not hold a C-10 or a C-16, so we do not work on fire alarm systems; that is coordinated with your own licensed fire alarm contractor.