TTB COLA Processing Times
Daily snapshots of the TTB Certificate of Label Approval queue: median turnaround in days, queue depth, and queue frontier date by commodity.
The TTB publishes a small statistics page showing how long the current COLA queue is — the median days from filing to approval, and how far back the agency is currently working. The page updates daily and isn't archived anywhere by TTB. Once a value changes, the previous one is gone.
COLA Cloud snapshots that page every business day, so the full history is available as a time series. Useful for anyone planning a product launch (when should you file?), anyone explaining a launch delay (was the queue slow?), or anyone tracking TTB operational performance over time.
We also surface today's numbers on the TTB Data Pulse hub as easy-to-scan chips.
Schema
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
commodity |
string | beer (malt beverage), wine, or distilled spirits |
snapshot_date |
date | Date the TTB page was scraped |
turnaround_days_median |
integer | Median calendar days from filing to approval |
queue_frontier_date |
date | Filing date TTB is currently working on (oldest open application) |
queue_depth_days |
integer | snapshot_date minus queue_frontier_date, in days |
Sample query
select snapshot_date, turnaround_days_median
from cola_processing_times
where commodity = 'distilled spirits'
order by snapshot_date desc
limit 90;Who uses this
- Time a product launch around the COLA queue — file when median turnaround is fast.
- Investigate whether a stuck application is unusual or just sitting in a normal queue.
- Track TTB operational performance over time (e.g. after a hiring freeze or shutdown).
- Benchmark your team's COLA cycle time against the federal median.
License & reuse
This dataset is dedicated to the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. Use it however you like — commercially, in derivative products, in research — with no attribution required. Attribution to COLA Cloud is appreciated but not required.
The data is sourced from the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), a federal agency. Federal government works are not copyrightable; the cleaning and normalization layered on top is dedicated to the public domain.