Cannabis benchmarks: cost per pound, basket size, margins

How to read a cannabis benchmark

A benchmark is only useful if you know who measured it, when, and in which state. Cannabis cannot lawfully cross state lines, so there is no national market. There are dozens of sealed state markets with different prices, taxes, and license counts. A cost per pound that is excellent in New Jersey loses money in Oregon.

Three rules keep you out of trouble:

1. Date everything. Prices in mature states have fallen by half or more since 2021. A 2021 benchmark describes a different industry.
2. Match the state and the license model. Compare a Michigan store with Michigan data. Whether the state caps licenses matters more than almost anything else; see limited-license vs open-market states.
3. Ask what is inside the number. “Cost per pound” with no rent, no overhead, and trim counted as output is not comparable to a fully loaded figure from a public filing.

The tables below use regulator data, public-company filings, and named data vendors. Where a figure is trade commentary rather than a measurement, it is labeled. This is educational material, not tax, legal, or valuation advice for any particular business.

Cultivation: what does it cost to grow a pound?

Reported, fully loaded costs in mid-2026 ran from about $120 per pound in a very large California greenhouse to about $670 per pound in a new indoor facility in New Jersey. The most useful public data comes from two companies that publish the figure every quarter.

Operator and state	Grow type	Cost per pound	Selling price per pound	Period
Glass House Brands, California	Greenhouse, very large scale	$122 per equivalent dry pound	$211 average	Q2 2026
Grown Rogue, Michigan	Indoor	$277	$615 bulk	Q2 2026
Grown Rogue, Oregon	Indoor	$326	$592 bulk	Q2 2026
Grown Rogue, New Jersey	Indoor, newer facility	$670	$2,077 packaged	Q2 2026

Read these with care. Glass House sells mostly biomass and bulk flower from millions of square feet of greenhouse, so both its cost and its price sit far below indoor figures. Its cost also moves with the season: it reported $91 per pound in the second quarter of 2025 and $122 a year later. Grown Rogue’s numbers are for craft-grade indoor flower, and the company is widely regarded as a low-cost producer, so treat its Michigan and Oregon figures as a good operator’s result rather than a typical one.

Trade commentary usually puts indoor production at roughly $400 to $900 per pound and outdoor at $150 to $300. Those ranges are not surveys. A seller whose books support a fully loaded indoor cost under $400 in a mature state is in a small group.

The margin test buyers run

The benchmark that matters is the spread between cost and the local wholesale price, and how much price decline it can absorb.

Illustrative, using the reported Michigan figures: a selling price of $615 less a cost of $277 leaves $338 per pound, a 55% margin. If the bulk price fell 25% to about $461, the margin would still be $184. Now take a grower in the same state with a cost of $550. Today’s spread is $65. The same 25% price drop puts that grower $89 underwater on every pound. Both businesses may show a profit on last year’s tax return. Only one is financeable.

You can run the same test on your own numbers with the cultivation cost-per-pound calculator. How buyers turn the result into a price is covered in cultivation valuation per square foot and per pound.

Wholesale flower prices in 2026

The national reference is the Cannabis Benchmarks U.S. Spot Index, which stood at $1,088 per pound on 4 September 2026. That average blends high-priced limited-license states with oversupplied ones, so state data matters more.

Market	Price point	Date	Source
U.S. composite	$1,088 per pound wholesale spot	4 Sep 2026	Cannabis Benchmarks
Colorado	$607 per pound state average market rate for retail flower	Apr to Jun 2026	Colorado Department of Revenue
Michigan	$615 per pound bulk indoor, one producer’s realized price	Q2 2026	Grown Rogue
Oregon	$592 per pound bulk indoor, one producer’s realized price	Q2 2026	Grown Rogue
Michigan retail	$58.18 per ounce average adult-use flower at the register	Jun 2026	Cannabis Regulatory Agency data via trade press

One comparison shows how far the spread runs. Michigan’s average retail ounce at $58.18 works out to about $931 per pound at the register, tax-exclusive. That is below the national wholesale index. A Michigan grower and a New Jersey grower are in different businesses.

The longer price series for Colorado, Michigan, Oregon, and Massachusetts, and what they do to value, are in how oversupply and price compression affect value.

Yield per square foot

Yield is the other half of cost per pound, because most cultivation cost is fixed. Consultant Ryan Douglas put the commercial floor at 30 to 35 grams of dry flower per square foot of canopy per harvest, with 50 to 70 grams marking strong operations (Greenhouse Grower, November 2020).

Current public data sits at the top of that range or above it. For the quarter ended 30 June 2026, Grown Rogue reported total yields of 90 grams per square foot in Michigan, 76 in Oregon, and 61 in New Jersey, with top-grade “A” flower at 56, 53, and 41 grams respectively. The gap between total yield and A-grade yield matters. Only A-grade flower earns the headline price. The rest sells as smalls or trim at a fraction of it.

When a seller quotes yield, ask three things: per harvest or per year, per square foot of flowering canopy or of the whole building, and total weight or A-grade only. Then tie the answer to harvest records in the track-and-trace system.

Retail: basket size, items, and discounts

Headset’s point-of-sale data is the most widely cited retail benchmark. For the 12 months ending June 2026, across the state markets it tracks:

Metric	Figure	Change year over year
Average basket	$47.29	Down 5.5%
Items per basket	2.74	Not reported
Transactions	473.8 million	Up 6.5%
Units sold	1.42 billion	Up 5.5%
Dollar sales	$24.3 billion	Up 0.8%
Average item price (June 2026)	$15.91	Not reported
Average discount rate (June 2026)	26.0% of shelf value	Not reported
Average eighth of flower (June 2026)	$20.64	Not reported

The pattern is the story of mature cannabis retail. Traffic and units are up more than 5%. Dollars are flat. Customers are buying more product for less money per trip, and stores are giving away a quarter of shelf value in discounts to keep them.

What sells

Category mix drives margin, because flower is the most price-compressed category. Headset’s shares for the same 12 months: flower 39.4%, vapor pens 25.3%, pre-rolls 15.8%, edibles 11.9%, concentrates 5.0%, and beverages 1.2%. Pre-rolls grew 10.1% and concentrates fell 7.7%. A store whose mix leans to vapes, pre-rolls, and edibles generally holds margin better than a flower-heavy store in the same town.

Turning basket size into store revenue

Illustrative: a store averaging 300 transactions a day at the Headset basket of $47.29 takes in about $14,187 a day, or roughly $5.18 million a year. At 200 transactions it is about $3.45 million. A buyer will rebuild revenue this way from point-of-sale data, then compare it with state track-and-trace sales and bank deposits. If the three do not agree, diligence slows down. The revenue checks are covered in how to evaluate a cannabis business for sale.

Margins: gross, EBITDA, and after-tax

Retail gross margin

Headset’s model of the median store put retail gross margin at 42.7% in 2025, down from 52.6% in 2021, as reported by Cova. Nearly ten points of margin disappeared in four years, mostly through discounting and price competition.

Apply it to the illustrative $5.18 million store: gross profit is about $2.21 million at 42.7%. At the 2021 margin it would have been about $2.72 million. The half-million-dollar difference comes straight out of earnings, because rent and payroll did not fall with it.

Vertically integrated operators

Public multi-state operators report higher blended margins because they keep the cultivation and manufacturing margin on products sold through their own stores. Trulieve reported a 60% gross margin and a 36% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2025. Curaleaf reported a 50% adjusted gross margin and a 22% adjusted EBITDA margin. These are not fair comparisons for a standalone store or a standalone grow. They are a fair comparison for a vertically integrated group in a limited-license state.

Wholesale growers show how volatile margin is. Glass House’s gross margin was 55% in the second quarter of 2025, 14% in the first quarter of 2026, and 34% in the second quarter of 2026. One quarter of a grower’s results tells you very little.

After-tax margin and 280E

Pre-tax margins overstate what an adult-use owner keeps. Under IRC 280E, a business trafficking in a Schedule I substance can deduct cost of goods sold but not rent, payroll, or marketing. Adult-use marijuana remains Schedule I after the April 2026 order that moved state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III, so adult-use retail still pays tax on something close to gross profit.

Headset estimated that the typical dispensary would save about $268,000 a year in federal tax without 280E, based on a model of the median store across 24 state markets. That figure is a useful benchmark for the size of the 280E burden on one ordinary store. How to recast an income statement for it is covered in cannabis financial statements under 280E.

How many operators make money at all?

Fewer than you would think. In Whitney Economics’ June 2024 business conditions survey, 27.3% of operators said they were profitable, 40.6% were breaking even, and 32.2% were losing money. The profitable share was 42.4% in 2022. The survey compared that with a 65.3% profitability rate for U.S. small businesses generally.

For a seller, this is good news if you are in the profitable group. Buyers are looking at a field where most targets do not earn money, so documented, repeatable profit is scarce and commands attention.

Which benchmarks move sale price the most?

Buyers weigh a handful of numbers far more heavily than the rest.

License type	Benchmark buyers check first	Why it moves price
Cultivation	Fully loaded cost per pound against current local wholesale	Shows whether the facility survives the next price drop
Cultivation	A-grade yield per square foot of canopy	Fixed costs spread over saleable output
Retail	Transactions per day and basket trend over 24 months	Separates a traffic problem from a pricing problem
Retail	Gross margin after discounts	Discounting hides inside a healthy-looking top line
Retail	Rent as a share of revenue	Non-deductible under 280E for adult-use sales
Manufacturing	Input cost per gram of output and yield from biomass	Commodity distillate pricing leaves little room
All	After-tax cash flow, with and without 280E	This is what services acquisition debt

If your numbers beat the benchmark, document it before you go to market: monthly cost-per-pound schedules, point-of-sale exports, and reconciliations to the state system. If they trail it, know why, and know whether a buyer could fix it. Both cases are part of preparing a cannabis business for sale. The way these inputs become a price is laid out in cannabis business valuation and, for stores, in dispensary valuation multiples.

Where to get current data for your state

• State regulators. Michigan’s Cannabis Regulatory Agency publishes monthly price and sales reports. Oregon’s OLCC publishes harvest, price, and sales data. Colorado’s Department of Revenue sets quarterly average market rates. Massachusetts’s Cannabis Control Commission runs an open data platform.
• Public-company filings. Quarterly releases from growers that report cost per pound, and from multi-state operators that report gross and EBITDA margins, are free and audited or reviewed.
• Data vendors. Headset for retail point-of-sale metrics and Cannabis Benchmarks for wholesale prices. Summary figures are public; state-level detail is paid.
• Your own systems. Point-of-sale and track-and-trace exports are the benchmark a buyer trusts most, because they can be tied to tax filings and deposits.

If you want to see how your numbers compare before you decide whether to sell, that is a reasonable topic for a confidential intro call.