New Federal Report Tracks Nearly $15 Billion In Marijuana Revenue Collected By States Over The Last Five Years

A newly updated federal government report shows that states where marijuana is legal have generated nearly $15 billion in tax revenue from legal cannabis sales since late 2021.

The U.S. Census Bureau this month issued the latest periodic update to its Cannabis Excise Sales Tax Collections data to include totals from the first quarter of 2026, during which states reported taking in a total of $825.1 million in marijuana tax revenue.

Since the agency began tracking the issue in the third quarter of 2021, states have raked in more than $14.8 billion in earnings from cannabis sales, the latest data shows.

The new numbers show there has been a dip in state marijuana tax revenue compared to the last quarter of 2025, which saw cannabis earnings of $878.1 million.

Individual states reporting the highest dollar amounts from marijuana sales during Q1 of this year were California ($151.9 million), Washington State ($98.9 million), Michigan ($72.5 million), New York ($69.6 million), Illinois ($64.9 million) and Colorado ($53.3 million).

The latest updated federally compiled figures also provide a look at which states have brought in the most cannabis revenue over time since the Census Bureau started tracking the issue nearly five years ago.

The more than $3.1 billion that California has generated from marijuana sales since late 2021 represents more than a fifth of all cannabis dollars brought into state coffers across the country during that period. Washington State comes in second place, with $2.1 billion, followed by Illinois ($1.3 billion), Colorado $1.3 billion), Michigan ($1.2 billion), Massachusetts ($831.5 million) and Oregon ($777.7 million).

The federal data doesn’t include tax earnings from quarters prior to Q3 2021.

A separate report published this month by the advocacy group the Marijuana Policy Project found that states have generated more than $28.4 billion in tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales since the first markets launched over a decade ago.

While those figures reach back further than the Census Bureau’s do, they don’t account for additional revenue that states have collected from medical marijuana sales, or from cannabis business application and licensing fees.

Notably, the Census tracker’s numbers lag behind the real-time market. The agency says figures shown are “based on a calendar quarter and generally represent taxes collected on sales made during the prior quarter (i.e. data released in September 2023 will cover sales during the quarter ended June 30, 2023).”

Data is also incomplete. Nevada, for example, did not report any data for Q1 2026 despite providing information for previous quarters.

While not every state with legal marijuana has consistently provided data for the national tracker, the project nevertheless represents the federal government’s growing effort to account for the size and scope of the cannabis industry—which despite the growing number of state legalization laws remains generally federally illegal, although the rescheduling reform being implemented by the Trump administration is partially changing that.

In 2023, the Census Bureau separately updated its survey of private businesses to better capture marijuana-related economic activity.

Together, the tracking and reporting efforts indicate an increasing willingness by the federal government to acknowledge the billions of dollars in annual economic activity generated by an industry that it continues to largely prohibit.

The new state tax revenue data used to build the report “result from a complete canvass of all state government agencies,” the bureau said in a methodology note. While it refers to the revenue as “quarterly cannabis excise sales tax collections,” it also says that “taxes” are defined rather broadly.

“For this dataset, the concept of ‘taxes’ is comprised of all compulsory contributions exacted by a government for public purposes,” it said. “Tax revenue is further defined to include related penalty and interest receipts of a government but to exclude protested amounts.”

The bureau has two separate tax codes for marijuana revenue that it asks states to report, one for taxes on cannabis transactions and another for business license fees.

The agency has said its own figures might not align perfectly with state-reported data “because the Census Bureau may be using a different definition of which organizations are covered by the term, ‘state government.’” The bureau’s definition, it explains, “refers not only to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of a given state, but it also includes agencies, institutions, commissions, and public authorities.”