How often gas pumps and retail scales get inspected, by state
For each US state: how often commercial fuel dispensers and retail scales are tested for accuracy, and who has to arrange it -- taken from the state's own statute where the state sets an interval in law, and from the agency's own description of its programme where it does not. Answers 'how often are gas pumps inspected in [state]', 'how often do scales have to be tested', and 'who is responsible for getting my scale inspected'. The common assumption is that every state inspects annually and that the state pays for it, and both halves of that are wrong often enough to matter: Texas requires a commercial device to be tested only once every four years and lets the department go longer still if funding is short, while Kansas requires annual testing but puts the cost and the arranging on the device's owner, who must hire a licensed service company. No compiled multi-state table exists, because building one means reading fifty statutes and fifty agency sites in fifty formats and re-checking them every year.
The data
| State | Inspection interval | Devices covered | Who arranges the test | Legal basis | Source page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kansas | at least annually | a device used for weighing, measuring or both that is used commercially | device owner | 83-304. | Kansas Statutes K.S.A. 83-304 -- Annual inspection required |
| Louisiana | At least once a year | all commercial weighing and measuring devices | state agency inspectors | Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry -- Device registration and inspections | |
| Pennsylvania | the annual inspections on many devices throughout the state | Fuel Dispensers, Scales and Timing Devices | state agency inspectors | Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture -- Weights and Measures Inspection | |
| South Carolina | inspecting every pump in the state each year | fuel pumps | state agency inspectors | South Carolina Department of Agriculture -- Gas Pumps and Scales | |
| Texas | at least once every four years, or more often as required by the department | a commercial weighing or measuring device | device owner | Sec. 13.101. | Texas Agriculture Code Chapter 13 -- Weights and Measures |
| Wisconsin | at least annually | a scale with a weighing capacity of 5,000 pounds or more used for the commercial weighing of commodities | device owner | 98.16(3m)(a) | Wisconsin Statutes s. 98.16(3m)(a) |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 6 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- ksrevisor.govhttps://www.ksrevisor.gov/statutes/chapters/ch83/083_003_0004.html
- ldaf.la.govhttps://www.ldaf.la.gov/business/weights-measures/devices
- agriculture.pa.govhttps://www.agriculture.pa.gov/consumer_protection/weights_measures/Pages/Weights-and-Measures-Inspection-.aspx
- agriculture.sc.govhttps://agriculture.sc.gov/permits-and-inspections/gas-pumps-and-scales/
- tcss.legis.texas.govhttps://tcss.legis.texas.gov/resources/AG/htm/ag.13.htm
- docs.legis.wisconsin.govhttps://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/98/16/3m/a
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
- data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.
From your own code
Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.
pip install refsource
refsource lookup weights-measures-device-inspection-intervals-by-state state=Kansas
npx -y refsource lookup weights-measures-device-inspection-intervals-by-state state=KansasSet your AI assistant up to use this
Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.
{
"mcpServers": {
"referencesource": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
}
}
}Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project
Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:
When a question needs "How often gas pumps and retail scales get inspected, by state", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `weights-measures-device-inspection-intervals-by-state`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.