At a glance
Alaska publishes no retail sales figure, and neither does anyone else with access to the underlying returns. The state taxes cannabis at cultivation by weight - $50 an ounce of bud, $25 immature, $15 trim, $1 a clone - so nothing in Alaska's public data records what consumers spent. Every figure on this page is either that tax or a weight worked out from it.
Where the tax has gone
Monthly cultivation excise tax
This is the tax a cultivation facility owes when it sells or transfers product to a retail store or a manufacturer. It is calculated on the returns filed for that month, so it is a liability, not cash in the bank: Alaska's own annual report shows collections running between 0.4% and 4.2% below the tax calculated for the same fiscal year.
It is not a sales tax and it does not move with what anyone paid at a counter. It moves with the weight transferred and the statutory rate per ounce.
Two rates arrived on 1 January 2019. Before that date only bud and flower ($50) and the remainder of the plant ($15) existed. The $25 rate for immature, seedy or failed bud and the $1 flat rate per clone are drawn as gaps for the 27 months before they existed, not as zero.
Which part of the plant is taxed
Excise tax by category
How much cannabis that is
Alaska prints the placeholder #,### in every single quantity cell of this report — 468 of them — so the weight below is not a figure the state published. It is the tax divided by the rate the state printed beside it.
Ounces transferred, worked out from the tax
How far this can be trusted. Alaska's annual report does publish these ounces once a year, which is the only reason this series can be checked at all. Summed over the state's July–June fiscal years, the figures below reproduce its published quantities for 2022 through 2025 to within 0.24%, and the clone counts to the exact plant. The remaining difference is whole-dollar rounding in the tax, plus late and amended returns restating months after the annual report froze.
Clones are not on this chart. Alaska taxes them at a flat $1 per plant rather than by weight, so dividing their tax by their rate yields a number of plants — which is why they appear as a count at the top of the page and are excluded from the ounce total here, exactly as the state excludes them from its own.
The mix by weight
Bud carries most of the tax and trim carries most of the weight, because the rate on bud is more than three times the rate on trim. A chart of the tax and a chart of the plant are not the same chart.
Share of ounces transferred
Common questions
Why is there no sales figure?
Because Alaska does not collect one. The state's cannabis tax is levied on cultivation facilities, per ounce, at the moment product is sold or transferred to a retail store or a manufacturer — not on the sale to a consumer. Nothing in the returns the Department of Revenue receives records what anyone paid at a counter, so no retail dollar figure exists to publish. Any Alaska “sales” figure you find elsewhere was produced by multiplying something by an assumed markup.
If the state doesn't publish ounces, where does the weight come from?
From the tax. Every quantity cell in the monthly report is the placeholder #,###, but the report also prints the tax and the rate per ounce, and tax divided by rate is a weight. The state does publish real ounce totals once a year in its annual report, and this derivation reproduces them to within a quarter of one per cent, so it is checked arithmetic rather than an estimate. It is still labelled derived, because the state did not publish it monthly and the two are different claims.
Why do some months show a gap instead of zero?
Because those are different claims. Two of the four tax categories — immature bud at $25 an ounce and clones at $1 a plant — did not exist until 1 January 2019, and Alaska leaves those cells blank in its own table. Publishing them as $0 would say the categories existed and raised nothing. Every gap on this page carries the reason it is a gap.
Is this comparable with other states' figures?
On tax, with a caveat; on sales, not at all. Alaska's tax base is cultivation weight, while most states tax retail spending, so the two answer different questions and this site labels Alaska's accordingly. Its per-resident figure inherits the same caveat. Alaska never appears on the retail-sales or price comparisons, because the underlying figures do not exist.
Why is there no count of licensed dispensaries?
Alaska's licensing regulator, AMCO, sits on a host protected by a bot wall that refuses every automated request, including ones sending a full browser's headers. The licence data is public and is not machine-reachable, so this page says so rather than showing a number from somewhere else.
Where these figures come from
Sourcing, basis and comparabilityAdult-use retail since 2016; Alaska has no licensed commercial medical channel. The state taxes cannabis at CULTIVATION, per ounce, when a cultivation facility sells or transfers product to a retail store or a product manufacturer - not at the till. So Alaska publishes tax and nothing else: no retail dollars, and no quantity either, because every Ounces cell in the monthly report is a placeholder.
Basis — Cultivation excise tax calculated on filed returns, by month of sale or transfer
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- adult_use
- Rounding
- Every Calculated Tax cell observed through 2026-06 is a whole dollar with no cents.
The regulator's own words: DOR: 'The marijuana tax is imposed when marijuana is sold or transferred from a marijuana cultivation facility to a retail marijuana store or marijuana product manufacturing facility.' The figures are the tax calculated on the returns filed, which is a liability, not cash received.
Basis — Total cultivation excise tax, summed from DOR's four category columns
- Measurement
- derived
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- adult_use
The regulator's own words: No total column exists in the source; this sum is our arithmetic.
Derivation. tax_excise_total = sum of the category taxes DOR publishes for that month Error: Exact arithmetic on published whole-dollar figures. The only reason it is marked derived rather than reported is that the monthly report prints no total row, so this number is ours and not DOR's..
Basis — Quantity transferred, worked out from tax and the published rate
- Measurement
- derived
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- adult_use
- Rounding
- Derived quantities are rounded to two decimal places for storage.
The regulator's own words: DOR's 2025 annual report: 'The tax rate is $50 per ounce on marijuana bud/flower, $25 per ounce on immature, seedy, or failed marijuana bud/flower, and $15 per ounce on other parts of the marijuana plant ("trim"). Clones are taxed at a flat rate of $1 per marijuana plant.' The rates used here are nevertheless read from the monthly table on every run, not from that sentence.
Derivation. quantity[category] = tax[category] / rate[category], where rate is read from DOR's own rate column for that month and category. For clones the result is a number of plants, not a weight, because the rate is $1 per plant. Error: Two sources of error, both small and both measured rather than assumed. (1) The published tax is a whole dollar, so a month's quantity is uncertain by at most 1/rate - 0.02 oz at $50, 0.04 at $25, 0.07 at $15, and nothing at all for clones, where a $1 rate makes the count exact. (2) DOR's returns tax a package containing a mix of categories at the highest rate that applies to it, so the split between categories is the taxpayer's allocation, not a laboratory measurement. Both are already inside DOR's own published quantities, which this derivation reproduces to a worst case of 0.231% - so neither is a reason to distrust the series relative to the regulator's own figure..
Sources 2
| Role | Source | Format | From | Last verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Report of Marijuana Transferred or Sold (Old Report Format) Alaska Department of Revenue, Tax Division | html | 2016-10 | 2026-08-16 | One unauthenticated GET returns the entire history as server-rendered HTML: 117 consecutive months, 2016-10 to 2026-06, no missing month. Two tables, seven columns each. DOR states on the page that reports post on the tenth of the month and that prior months keep being updated for late and amended returns. |
| Cross-check | Marijuana Tax Annual Report data (Collections Summary, Ounces, Filing Information) Alaska Department of Revenue, Tax Division | html | FY2022 | 2026-08-16 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. The Ounces table is the independent publication of the quantity the monthly report suppresses, and the derived series reproduces it across FY2022/FY2023/FY2024/FY2025 to a worst case of 0.231%, with the clone counts exact in every year. The Collections Summary on the same page is a DIFFERENT basis - cash received, not tax calculated - and the monthly sum sits +4.17% (FY2022), -0.58% (FY2023), +1.00% (FY2024), +0.37% (FY2025) against it. That line is never reconciled and never averaged. |
Why each marker above says what it says
| Metric | Marker | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail sales | Not like-for-like | There is no Alaska retail sales figure to join. The state taxes cannabis at cultivation by weight, so no part of its public data records what consumers paid, and producing a figure would need a markup the source does not publish. |
| Medical / adult-use split | Single-channel market | Adult-use only. Alaska licenses no commercial medical dispensaries, so a 100% adult-use share describes the market's structure and is not a measured split of anything. |
| Price per gram | Not like-for-like | No price is derivable. A price needs dollars and a weight for the same transactions; Alaska publishes tax dollars at the cultivation tier and no retail dollars at all, and the only weight here is worked out from that tax. Dividing one by the other would return the tax rate. |
| Per capita | Partly comparable | Alaska can be shown per resident on tax and on derived weight only, and the tax is levied on cultivation by weight rather than on retail spending. Per resident it therefore moves with harvested weight and the statutory per-ounce rate, and is not comparable with a retail-excise-per-resident figure. |
| Patient counts | Not like-for-like | No Alaska patient count is published anywhere this pipeline can reach. The tax data has no patient dimension at all - it is levied on growers, not on buyers - and the Department of Health publishes no marijuana page: its sitemap carries 215 URLs and names three other registries (cancer, birth defects) while containing no cannabis or marijuana entry of any kind. Alaska also has no licensed medical retail channel for a patient count to describe. |
| Licence counts | Not like-for-like | Licence counts are unobtainable, not merely unpublished. AMCO's licence search is the only source and its host answers 403 to every automated client behind a DataDome challenge, so there is nothing to count without defeating a bot wall. |
| Tax revenue | Partly comparable | A cultivation tax on weight, not a retail excise: it moves with the weight transferred and the statutory per-ounce rate, not with what consumers spent. The figures are the tax calculated on filed returns - a liability - and DOR's own cash collections for the same fiscal years run below them. |
What is checked on every run 3
| Check | Kind | Last result |
|---|---|---|
| Derived quantities, summed over July-June windows of the monthly period labels, against the ounces and clone counts DOR publishes per fiscal year in its annual report. | cross source reconciliation | 16 comparisons across FY2022/FY2023/FY2024/FY2025: worst 0.231%, every difference under 0.25%, clones exact in all four years. |
| The same comparison at a much wider band. Beyond it, tax divided by the published rate is no longer reproducing DOR's own quantity, which means the derivation itself is wrong rather than drifting. | identity | pass; worst observed 0.231% |
| The total excise tax per month has no published counterpart to check against. | unchecked | Not cross-checked. The monthly report prints no total row, so summing the four category columns is our arithmetic and the document that produced them cannot contradict it. The nearest external figure, DOR's annual Tax Collections, is cash received rather than tax calculated and is registered as a cross-check that is not expected to agree. Unlike the derived weight - which DOR does independently publish per fiscal year - this number is taken on trust from the four columns above it. |
The regulator's own notes, and what is still open
The regulator's own notes
The reports will be available on the tenth day of the month, or the first business day if the tenth day falls on a weekend or holiday. The reported data for prior months will continue to be updated on the tenth day of each month to reflect late or amended returns.
— Alaska DOR, Report of Marijuana Transferred or Sold
The tax return is due on the last day of the month following the month in which marijuana was sold or transferred. For example, the tax return for sales or transfers made in March is due April 30.
— Alaska DOR, Marijuana Tax FAQ
The changes, went into effect January 1, 2019 and added a third tax rate for immature or abnormal bud: $25 an ounce for buds or flowers that did not mature, that contain seeds or that failed testing because of mold. The changes stipulated that clones will be taxed at a flat rate of $1 per plant, and not by weight; and that packages of marijuana that contain a combination of any of the three tax rates will be taxed at the highest rate.
— Alaska DOR, Marijuana Tax 2025 Annual Report, History
The marijuana tax is imposed when marijuana is sold or transferred from a marijuana cultivation facility to a retail marijuana store or marijuana product manufacturing facility.
— Alaska DOR, Marijuana Tax 2025 Annual Report, Description
Open questions on this data
Unresolved definitional questions that gate something. Listed because a question nobody can see is a question nobody closes.
- Does HB 91 (34th Legislature) pass, replacing the per-ounce cultivation tax and adding a retail sales tax? If it does, Alaska would finally have a retail dollar series and every rate constant in this file changes. Closing it needs: Re-read DOR's rate column on every run - the unknown_rate error fires on any new value - and re-check the bill's status at akleg.gov/basis/Bill/Detail/34?Root=HB%2091.
- Can Alaska licence counts be obtained without defeating a bot wall - by a public records request, an AMCO data extract, or a published licensee list elsewhere? Blocks: license_counts. Closing it needs: Ask AMCO for a periodic licensee extract, or check whether the Marijuana Control Board's meeting materials publish counts.
- Does Alaska's medical marijuana registry publish a patient count anywhere, and did it survive the 2026 Department of Health site migration? Closing it needs: Ask the Department of Health's Health Analytics and Vital Records section directly. A crawl will not settle it while the sitemap has no cannabis entry to crawl.
- Are DOR's annual quantity figures for FY2017-FY2021 published anywhere machine-readable? They would extend the independent check on the derived weight back to the start of the series. Closing it needs: Look for the archived annual report PDFs; the ?Year= parameter on the data page is ignored and always returns the newest four fiscal years.