Washington cannabis sales have fallen 45% from their 2020 peak
Legal cannabis arrived in Washington in July 2014. In today’s dollars, sales went almost straight up for six years — from $49M in the first quarter to a peak of $481M in 2020 Q3 — and have been sliding ever since. The latest reading, $265M in 2026 Q1, is 45% below that peak and down 7.2% from a year earlier. (All figures here are inflation-adjusted to constant 2026 dollars; in unadjusted dollars the peak was a smaller-looking $381M and the drop from it about 31%.)
The 2020 spike was real: cannabis was deemed essential, stores stayed open, and stuck-at-home demand pushed real sales up about 27% year-over-year. The shaded band marks Washington’s only economic contraction inside this window — the 2020 COVID downturn — and cannabis is the rare series that climbed straight through it. But the boom didn’t outlast the pandemic. In real terms, annual sales peaked at $1.81 billion in 2020 and have fallen every year since, to $1.16 billion in 2025.
That is the real story: adjusted for inflation, Washington’s cannabis market has shrunk year-over-year for 20 straight quarters — every quarter since spring 2021. Nominal dollars hide it, because rising prices flatter the recent numbers; the unadjusted series is “only” down about 31% from peak. Falling retail dollars also understate what’s moving off the shelf — Washington’s per-gram cannabis prices have dropped sharply since 2014, so the state is almost certainly selling far more product for that shrinking pile of money.
One structural break is worth flagging. Through mid-2016 the series blends two channels: licensed I-502 recreational stores and medical “collective gardens.” The Cannabis Patient Protection Act shut the collectives down on July 1, 2016, folding medical patients into the licensed retail system — which is why the early-2016 composition shifts even as the total keeps climbing.
Across nearly twelve years, Washington’s legal market has rung up about $14.7 billion in retail sales measured in today’s dollars (roughly $12.3 billion unadjusted).
Source: WA Department of Revenue, “Recreational and medical cannabis taxes” — Estimated Sales Tax Collected on Sales of Cannabis (XLSX), quarterly total retail value before tax, prepared by DOR’s Research & Fiscal Analysis Division. Deflated to constant 2026 dollars using CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items, NSA (BLS: CUUR0000SA0). The 37% cannabis excise tax is administered by the WA Liquor and Cannabis Board. Quarterly; DOR states each quarter is static and not revised. Next update: DOR posts 2026 Q2 in roughly August 2026.