Do You Need a License to Tell Fortunes in Massachusetts?

Massachusetts does not ban fortune telling. It licenses it. M.G.L. c. 140, sec. 185I says no person shall tell fortunes for money unless the local licensing authority has issued a license, and whoever does it unlicensed is punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars.

The rule turns on money and on the town

Two words carry most of the section. “For money” is what brings the conduct inside it, so the section is written around a paid reading rather than the practice in the abstract. And the license comes from the local licensing authority, which means the answer to whether a reader is licensed is a city or town answer, not a state one.

A residency requirement most people never hear about

The strangest working part of section 185I is not the fine. It is the sentence that says the license shall be granted only to applicants who have resided continuously in the city or town where the license is sought for at least the twelve months immediately preceding the date of the application. Move to a new town and the twelve-month clock starts again there. The section also says no such license shall be transferred or assigned, so a license cannot be handed off with a storefront.

The fee is capped

The fee is two dollars unless the city or town has set its own by ordinance or by-law, and the section puts a ceiling on that local figure: in no event greater than fifty dollars. A community can price the license, but only inside a range the Legislature already drew.

What this page is not

This page describes what section 185I says. It does not say how any particular city or town runs its licensing process, how the section is enforced, or how a court would treat a specific set of facts. Read the section yourself at the link above, and for a question about something that actually happened, telephone the firm.