The State of Legal Weed: America's Adult-Use Market, State by State

Data sourced from state cannabis regulators' public filings and reports. Population figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Where a regulator doesn't publish a number, the table notes the alternate source (the Marijuana Policy Project, or news reports citing state officials).

Twenty-four states and D.C. now let adults 21 and over possess cannabis. Twenty-three of those states actually have stores open. Add up the people living in them and you get about 170 million Americans, roughly half the country, who can walk into a licensed shop and buy weed legally.

That's the headline. The real story is in the numbers underneath it, and they don't all point the same way. Some states are pushing past a billion dollars a year. Some medical programs are shrinking because rec made the card pointless. A few regulators barely publish anything at all.

I pulled the latest numbers I could find from each state regulator: population, who runs the program, how many medical patients are still registered, and what the adult-use side is doing in sales or transactions. Where a state doesn't publish something, I say so. Where the only number out there is old or unofficial, it's labeled that way in the table at the bottom.

Where the money is

Massachusetts is still the East Coast heavyweight. The Cannabis Control Commission reported $1.65 billion in adult-use sales for 2025, spread across roughly 46.3 million receipts.

Illinois isn't far behind at $1.507 billion in 2025 adult-use sales, with 52.1 million items sold. Keep in mind that's items, not transactions. Illinois doesn't publish a transaction count.

Michigan is the one that keeps surprising people. Adult-use sales hit $258.8 million in August 2026 alone, and the state has now passed $15.41 billion in cumulative rec sales.

Here at home, New York did $1.482 billion in adult-use sales through November 2025, according to the Office of Cannabis Management's annual report, and about $895 million in the first half of 2026. For a market that got off to a rough start, that's real momentum.

New Jersey crossed $1.118 billion in adult-use sales in 2025, while its medical side did just $46.2 million. That gap tells you where patients went.

Then there are the West Coast pioneers. Colorado did $1.21 billion in combined medical and retail sales in 2025. Washington came in around $1.14 billion total. Oregon's adult-use sales were about $885.8 million. Nevada reported $757.7 million in taxable sales for fiscal 2025. These were some of the earliest rec markets in the country. Note that Colorado, Washington and Nevada report medical and retail as one combined number.

The middle of the pack is where it gets interesting. Maryland did about $918 million in adult-use sales in 2025 on roughly 14.8 million transactions, and logged 1.52 million transactions in August 2026 alone. Ohio's first full year of rec produced about $836 million, and the state has logged 27.7 million adult-use receipts since sales began in August 2024. Missouri did $1.26 billion in its 2024 program year. New Mexico hit about $568 million combined. Montana did about $289.4 million, and Maine $246.4 million on 4.84 million transactions.

The smaller New England markets round it out. Connecticut sold about $217.5 million in adult-use product in 2025. Vermont did $138.7 million from January through November 2025. Rhode Island's combined sales were $120.1 million, with an average ticket of $34.97, which works out to about 3.43 million transactions. Delaware, which only opened in August 2025, did more than $53.4 million in its first year.

A few states just don't give us much to work with. Alaska and California had no regulator-published sales or transaction figure we could confirm. Arizona's Department of Revenue tax data puts 2025 adult-use sales at about $1.06 billion. Minnesota's Office of Cannabis Management reported about $150 million in adult-use sales in the first year of rec.

What happened to the patients

Add up the latest counts and there are roughly a million medical patients across the 21 rec states that still track them. California and Maine don't keep a central registry at all, so they're not in that number.

The raw leader is Illinois, with 119,954 active patients as of the end of August 2026. But raw numbers don't tell you much when one state has 20 million people and another has 650,000. So I ran every state as patients per 1,000 residents.

New Mexico stands out. With 60,501 enrolled patients in a state of about 2.1 million, it has 28.5 patients for every 1,000 people. That's the highest of any state with open rec stores. Delaware would come in right behind it at 27.4, but its count dates back to 2023. Minnesota is next at 16.0, which makes sense since rec stores there only opened in September 2025. Missouri (14.0), Maryland (12.5) and Massachusetts (11.5) are also holding strong.

At the other end, Alaska has basically no medical program left, at 0.2 per 1,000. Oregon (2.7), Nevada (2.8), New York (3.5) and Washington (3.5) are all under 4.

New York is worth a closer look. OCM counted 81,500 certified patients in November 2025. By September 1, 2026, that was down to 70,104. That's about 11,000 patients gone in under a year, and I'd bet most of them are now just shopping rec.

Ohio is a good reminder to read the fine print. The state lists more than 473,000 "registered" patients, but that's everyone who has ever signed up. The number with an active registration and an active recommendation is 72,943 as of July 31, 2026.

The new kids and what's coming

Two states opened recently. Delaware's rec stores opened August 1, 2025, under the Office of the Marijuana Commissioner, and did more than $53.4 million in the first year. Minnesota's Office of Cannabis Management opened the doors in September 2025. It reported about $150 million in adult-use sales and roughly $100 million in medical in the first year. Its medical program counts 93,156 enrolled patients as of September 24, 2026.

The one to watch this fall is Massachusetts. Question 8 on the November 2026 ballot would repeal retail adult-use sales. In the state that just did $1.65 billion, that's not a small thing.

Virginia is next in line to open, with retail sales set to begin July 1, 2027. D.C. is still stuck. Both get their own story, which you can read alongside this one.

State by state

Population is the U.S. Census Bureau's July 1, 2025 estimate. Patients marked * come from the Marijuana Policy Project's table, which doesn't cite state sources, so treat them as unverified. Sales periods differ by state, so compare with care.

— means no regulator-published figure turned up in our data.

The bottom line

Legal cannabis in America isn't one market. It's 23 of them, each with its own rules, its own taxes and its own way of counting. One state reports receipts, another reports items, another lumps medical and rec together. If you're in this business, that's the first thing to understand. The second is that medical isn't dead. It's just splitting in two: states like New Mexico and Minnesota still have big programs, while in places like Oregon and Alaska the card barely matters anymore, and New York lost about 11,000 patients in under a year.

We'll keep updating these numbers as the states do.

Sources