Federal Tally Puts State Marijuana Taxes Near $15 Billion

The U.S. Census Bureau now keeps a running count of how much money states pull in from legal marijuana, and its latest update puts the cumulative total at nearly $15 billion since late 2021 — a figure the agency itself cautions is an undercount.

The bureau updated its Cannabis Excise Sales Tax Collections data this month to add the first quarter of 2026, when states reported a combined $825.1 million in marijuana tax revenue. Stack that on top of every quarter since the bureau began tracking the category in the third quarter of 2021, and states have collected more than $14.8 billion from cannabis sales.

The quarterly figure came in below the prior period. States took in $878.1 million in the final quarter of 2025, so the start of 2026 marks a sequential dip rather than a new high.

Inside the numbers

California remains the dominant contributor by a wide margin. The state has generated more than $3.1 billion since late 2021 — more than a fifth of every cannabis tax dollar states have reported to the federal government over that stretch. Washington State is a distant second at $2.1 billion, followed by Illinois and Colorado at roughly $1.3 billion each, Michigan at $1.2 billion, Massachusetts at $831.5 million and Oregon at $777.7 million.

The first-quarter rankings track the same hierarchy. California led with $151.9 million, ahead of Washington ($98.9 million), Michigan ($72.5 million), New York ($69.6 million), Illinois ($64.9 million) and Colorado ($53.3 million). New York’s showing stands out for a market that opened its first licensed stores only a few years ago and has been slow to scale.

Why the federal number is a floor

Here is where reading the data carefully matters. The $14.8 billion is not a complete tally of what states have earned from cannabis — it is the sum of what reporting states have disclosed since one specific quarter in 2021, and the bureau is blunt that it should not be read as a national total.

Three things hold the figure down. First, the series starts in the third quarter of 2021, so it captures none of the revenue from the years before that — Colorado and Washington have been taxing adult-use sales since 2014. Second, the bureau does not estimate missing data. When a state that collects cannabis taxes fails to report, the bureau leaves the cell blank rather than filling it in, and it warns that the dataset “should not be used to estimate the total cannabis sales tax collected for the U.S.” Nevada, for instance, reported in earlier quarters but submitted nothing for the first quarter of 2026. Third, the numbers lag the market — the revenue shown for a given quarter generally reflects sales made the quarter before.

That gap between an official-looking number and what it actually measures is why competing totals are floating around. A separate report from the advocacy group the Marijuana Policy Project this month put state revenue from recreational marijuana at more than $28.4 billion since the first markets opened over a decade ago. That figure reaches further back than the Census data but counts only adult-use sales, leaving out medical marijuana and the application and licensing fees states also charge. The two numbers are not in conflict; they are measuring different things over different periods.

What the count signals

The more telling story is that the federal government is building the machinery to measure an industry it still largely bans. The Census data product treats cannabis like any other taxable category, drawing on what it calls a complete canvass of state agencies, and the bureau separately retooled its survey of private businesses in 2023 to capture marijuana-related activity. The Trump administration’s move to reschedule medical cannabis has begun to soften the federal posture, but most of the sales feeding these tax totals remain federally illegal.

For operators, the quarter-over-quarter dip is the line worth watching. It lines up with a separate analysis from Vangst and Whitney Economics finding that U.S. cannabis revenue fell year over year for the first time in 2025, a contraction driven by oversupply and collapsing wholesale prices rather than shrinking demand. Mature markets are showing the strain: Michigan, one of the country’s largest, has watched sales slide as flower prices near record lows. Falling tax receipts in those states reflect cheaper product moving through the system, not fewer customers.

What the federal data does provide, incomplete as it is, is a shared scoreboard — one the government spent years declining to keep for a business it still treats as contraband.