Maryland Cannabis Sales Reach $917M in 2026, Up 5% Year Over Year

A $917 Million Year-to-Date Total, Up 5%

Maryland marijuana sales reached $917 million in 2026, a 5% increase over the same stretch of 2025, according to The Marijuana Herald.

The report's headline figure doesn't specify the cutoff date or the split between adult-use and medical sales. CannIntel is treating it as a year-to-date number until state data confirms the period.

Five percent isn't a boom. It's a market that has stopped sprinting.

What Single-Digit Growth Means for Operators

Growth of 5% in a state that launched adult-use sales on July 1, 2023 points to a market settling into maturity, where margins matter more than volume.

For licensed operators, who still can't deduct ordinary business expenses under federal tax rule 280E, slow top-line growth leaves little cushion if wholesale prices soften or retail competition tightens. The headline number doesn't say who is capturing the gain. That's the open question.

Four questions will decide whether $917 million is good news or merely flat news:

• Is the growth coming from more transactions or bigger baskets?
• Are average prices per gram rising, flat or falling?
• How much of the total is adult-use versus medical?
• Does the figure include or exclude sales tax?

Until those are answered, a 5% gain could mean very different things for a vertically integrated MSO and a single-store licensee.

Why Latin American Producers Are Watching

Maryland's growth is a purely domestic story, because federal law bars imports of THC cannabis into the United States.

That matters south of the border. Licensed producers in Colombia, where the term licenciatarios describes operators with export permits, can't sell flower or extract into Maryland dispensaries, no matter how large the state's market gets. Their export bets are Germany, Israel and other medical markets, not Baltimore or Bethesda.

Still, the U.S. matters to Latin American operators, but as a pricing benchmark and a source of capital and brand licensing, not as a destination for physical product. A state market growing 5% a year tells them how fast the world's largest consumer economy is absorbing legal cannabis, even though they can't ship into it.

For full background on this story, see the CannIntel topic hub on Maryland cannabis sales.

The next signal: the Maryland Cannabis Administration's next monthly sales release, which should show whether year-over-year growth holds near 5% or slips into the low single digits.