At a glance
Where the market is heading
Adult-use is sales to any adult 21+. Medical is sales to registry cardholders. Adult-use retail opened in the first month of this series, so there is no pre-launch era on this chart and no month where the adult-use line is a zero standing in for a channel that did not exist.
Monthly taxable sales by channel
These are estimates, and the estimate moves. The Department of Revenue publishes them under the heading “TAXABLE Sales (Estimated)” and footnotes them: “Taxable Sales is estimated based on revenue received. The Taxable Sales for each period covered will change as late returns, late payments, amendments and audits are processed.” Every month on this chart is therefore provisional, the newest ones most of all, and this pipeline re-reads the whole table on every run rather than adding a row to it.
The newest month is drawn as a gap, not a zero. ADOR prints a row of dollar signs and zeros for a month whose returns it has not processed yet. That is not a month without sales - the same agency's other file shows real money arriving for it - so the series carries a declared gap there and says why underneath.
One month's medical line goes below the line, and it is real. Amendments and audits can exceed a month's filings, and when they do the published figure is negative. It is left exactly as published: clamping it to zero would put a number on the page that the regulator never printed.
Who is buying
Arizona's split is a tax-class split, not a per-transaction customer flag: retailers report medical sales under one business code and adult-use sales under another, and ADOR publishes the two codes. It is the closest thing Arizona has to a channel split and it is not quite the same thing, because a reclassification between the two codes moves the split without a single customer changing what they bought.
Share of taxable sales by channel
What the state collects
Arizona taxes a cannabis sale twice. The Department of Revenue's page puts it plainly: “For adult use (recreational) marijuana, there is a transaction privilege tax (TPT) rate and an excise tax (16%) on the retail sales.” Medical sales carry the transaction privilege tax and no excise. The total line here is everything collected on the month's transactions, including the county, city and education shares.
Tax on the month's transactions
This chart is keyed to the month the transaction happened. ADOR also publishes the same money keyed to the month it arrived, and footnotes the difference: “Period Covered is the month in which the transaction occurred, and is different than the month the tax revenue was received by ADOR.” The next chart is that other series. They are the same dollars counted twice, and adding them would double the state's cannabis revenue.
The excise line is checked, not trusted. ADOR publishes the base the excise is charged on alongside the excise collected, so the rate can be recomputed from the state's own two columns every run - against the rate the state prints on its own page rather than one written into this pipeline. The result of that check is published in the state file's integrity block.
When the money actually arrives
The same tax, on the other clock. This is what the Department of Revenue banked during the month, whichever month's sales it came from, split into the share that goes to the state general fund and the share that goes to cities and counties. It runs ahead of the chart above, because a month's tax is received after the month has ended.
Tax received in the month
Two ADOR files publish this month's total independently, and they agree. One breaks it down by tax category, the other by which jurisdiction receives it. Neither is derived from the other, which makes the agreement worth something - and the state file records the result of comparing them on every month in the series.
The medical registry
Licensed medical retail in Arizona is older than this chart - it was running before the first month on it, which is why the line has no beginning here. The registry did not start shrinking when adult-use retail opened, either: it kept growing for a few months first, peaked in July 2021, and has been falling since. Cardholders let a certification lapse and buy on the other side of the counter instead. This is a point-in-time count of active cards, the same kind of measure Maryland publishes, which is why the two can share an axis on the compare page.
Active qualifying patients
All cardholders is not a patient count. It includes designated caregivers and every category of facility, dispensary and laboratory agent. The two lines diverge because the workforce is counted in one and not the other.
The Health Services report does not date these tables. It says only that they are point-in-time, while the dispensary count in the same edition is stamped the first day of the following month. They are attributed here to the report month, and the open question is recorded in the state file rather than resolved by assumption.
The first two months of this series have no registry figure. Those editions exist at their published addresses, but their tables are images rather than text, so nothing can be read out of them without optical character recognition. They are drawn as gaps with that reason, not as a line starting late.
How much is actually sold
The Department of Health Services publishes what medical dispensaries moved each month, in ounces, split into marijuana, edibles and everything else. This is the medical channel only. No adult-use weight appears in any of the five Arizona artifacts this page reads, which is one of three reasons it carries no price per gram: there is no denominator for the larger half of the market, the denominator that does exist mixes product forms whose ounces are not comparable, and the numerator itself goes negative when amendments land. What some other Arizona agency may publish elsewhere is not something this page has checked, so it does not say.
Medical weight sold, by product form
An edible's ounces are the weight of the product, not of the cannabis in it. The three lines are not three grades of the same thing, and summing them gives a figure whose unit means something different in each part. The state's own report sums them anyway, and this page draws the sum it publishes.
The department restates these figures after publishing them. Each edition also carries a year-to-date total, and comparing that against the sum of the months already published is what makes the restatements visible. The measured result is in the state file's integrity block; the largest of them are recorded there by month.
Who is licensed
Three counts, published as sentences rather than as a table, and each stamped with the first day of the month after the one it describes. Dispensaries are medical; establishments are the adult-use side; laboratories test for both.
Licensed premises and laboratories
Licensed is not the same as open. The same sentences also give the number of facilities actually operating, which is a smaller number in most months; that field is in the data file even though it is not drawn here.
Read naively, a count or a date comes out wrong. Four ADHS editions write their digits with spaces inside them - September 2024, October 2024, November 2024 and August 2025. A naive read of those sentences breaks the dispensary total in four of them, the dispensary as-of date in three and the dispensary operating count in two; September 2024 renders it "As of 1 0/1/2024 , there are a total of 1 36 medical marijuana dispensaries, with 135 operating facilities". The parser closes the spaces before the sentences are read, and a test pins all four.
Common questions
Why is there no price per gram for Arizona?
Because the two halves of that fraction do not fit together. The dollars come from the Department of Revenue and cover both channels; the weight comes from the Department of Health Services and covers only the medical one. No adult-use weight appears in any of the five Arizona artifacts this page reads. Even inside the medical channel the weight blends marijuana, edibles and “other” ounces, so the quotient would move whenever the product mix moved and would say nothing about price. And in at least one month the numerator is negative, because amendments exceeded filings. A number can be computed from those inputs; it would not be a price.
Why does the newest month show a gap where every other month shows a figure?
Because the Department of Revenue prints zeros for a month it has not processed returns for yet, and a zero there would say Arizona sold nothing. The evidence that it means something else is in the department's own second file, which shows tax money arriving for exactly that month. So the pipeline reads the zero row as unattributed rather than empty, keeps the literal token as evidence, and prints the reason under the gap. If the second file ever stopped corroborating it, the run would refuse to publish rather than guess.
Why do the figures change after they are published?
Because the state says they will. The footnote under the taxable-sales table reads: “Taxable Sales is estimated based on revenue received. The Taxable Sales for each period covered will change as late returns, late payments, amendments and audits are processed.” The health department's weight figures move too, which you can see by comparing each edition's year-to-date total against the months it already published. Every run here re-reads the entire history and overwrites it; nothing is appended, so a revised month is revised here as well.
There are two tax charts. Which one is the real number?
Both, on different clocks. One is the tax on the month's transactions, the other is the money the department received in the month. The department footnotes the distinction itself: “Period Covered is the month in which the transaction occurred, and is different than the month the tax revenue was received by ADOR.” The received series runs ahead, because tax on a month's sales arrives after the month ends. They are the same dollars counted twice, and they are deliberately on separate charts so nobody adds them.
Is the medical / adult-use split a real split?
It is a split of tax filings, not of till receipts. Arizona reports retail medical marijuana under one transaction-privilege-tax business code and retail adult-use under another, so the division is as good as the classification retailers apply. Once in this series the classification moved sharply between the two codes in a single month while the combined total stayed ordinary - which is what a reclassification looks like, and what a genuine change in buying behaviour does not. The split is published, and labelled as a tax-class proxy rather than as a customer flag.
How far back does this go, and why not further?
The sales series starts with the first month of adult-use retail, because that is when the Department of Revenue's marijuana table starts. Before then, medical marijuana tax was folded into the general retail category - the department's own footnote records that business code 203 covers “taxes collected that were previously reported under the Retail category” - so there is no separable medical sales figure to recover. The health department's monthly reports go back further at the same web addresses, but the editions before this series either use a superseded set of tables or publish them as images.
Where do these files come from, and what happens if one disappears?
Three fixed PDF addresses at the Department of Revenue, overwritten in place each month, plus one dated PDF a month from the Department of Health Services. Because the revenue files carry no date in their address, the previous edition is unrecoverable the moment it is replaced, so every fetch here is archived. The health department's filenames are not predictable - the month is sometimes abbreviated and sometimes not - and a wrong guess does not return an error page code, it returns a perfectly ordinary success with an error page in the body. Every fetch is therefore checked against the file's leading bytes rather than its status line.
Where these figures come from
Sourcing, basis and comparabilityArizona runs two retail channels side by side. Medical sales to registry cardholders predate this series; adult-use retail opened in the first month of it. Sales dollars come from the Department of Revenue's tax data and medical weight, patient and licence counts from the Department of Health Services - two agencies, and no single artifact carries both.
Basis — ADOR estimated taxable sales, by month of transaction
- Measurement
- estimated
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical, adult_use
- Rounding
- Every published cell is rounded to the whole dollar, which is why the in-file identities are asserted with a tolerance rather than at zero.
The regulator's own words: Taxable Sales is estimated based on revenue received. The Taxable Sales for each period covered will change as late returns, late payments, amendments and audits are processed. Period Covered is the month in which the transaction occurred, and is different than the month the tax revenue was received by ADOR.
Why an axis above reads unstated: Full-text search of all three ADOR PDFs and the landing page that links them for `gross`, `net`, `discount`, `rebate`, `deduct`, `exclud`, `includ`, `methodolog` and `defin`, over the VISIBLE text of each - the landing page's script blocks are excluded, because a match inside `bam.nr-data.net` is not evidence about ADOR's methodology. 9 terms over 4 ADOR artifacts return 3 hits, and here is every one of them: ador_by_category `includ` in "Excise Tax. * Total Collections includes State, County, City and Education Tax TPT collections and"; ador_landing `deduct` in "Compliance Program Location Based Reporting Deduction Codes Electronic Annual Estimated Tax Payment TPT Exemptions Tax"; ador_landing `defin` in "Marijuana Business Audit Filing Requirements Definitions and Frequently Asked Questions Marijuana Tax Collection Contracting Guidelines". None of them states whether the taxable-sales figure is before or after customer discounts, or whether the tax itself sits inside the base, and neither footnote quoted in this block's own `source_statement` contains any of the terms. Arizona's TPT is a tax on the seller and the 16% excise is levied on the same retail sale, so the temptation to reason it out from tax law is exactly what ANCHORS section 6 forbids. Both axes stay unstated. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — ADOR tax collections, by month received
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- filing_period
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical, adult_use
The regulator's own words: Period Covered is the month in which the transaction occurred, and is different than the month the tax revenue was received by ADOR. Total Collections includes State, County, City and Education Tax TPT collections and Marijuana Excise Tax.
Basis — ADHS medical dispensary transactions, by month
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
Basis — ADHS programme counts, point in time
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- point_in_time
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: ADHS monthly report, page 1: "Tables 1-4 reflect data that are point-in time." The report does not date those tables. The dated sentences in the same edition - dispensary, establishment and laboratory counts - are all stamped the first day of the month AFTER the report month, so this file attributes the counts to the report month and says so rather than implying a month-end measurement the source never claims.
Sources 4
| Role | Source | Format | From | Last verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Arizona Marijuana TPT and Excise Taxable Sales and Tax Collections, by Period Covered Arizona Department of Revenue, Office of Economic Research and Analysis | 2021-01 | 2026-08-17 | One file carries the whole history and is overwritten in place each month, so a single fetch rebuilds every period - which is exactly what the revision behaviour requires, and exactly why prior editions are unrecoverable without the archive this pipeline writes. | |
| Cross-check | Arizona Marijuana TPT and Excise Tax Collections, by Category Arizona Department of Revenue | 2021-01 | 2026-08-17 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. The period-covered file's grand total is $1,492,786,929 against $1,492,872,649 in the received-basis file, and the columns that differ are excise -$85,721; total -$85,720. The medical, adult use, eft columns are identical to the dollar. | |
| Cross-check | Arizona Collections/Distribution, by Jurisdiction Type Arizona Department of Revenue | 2021-01 | 2026-08-17 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. This file's Total Marijuana Taxes against the category file's Total Collections: exact on all 67 periods - every residual is zero. | |
| Cross-check | Arizona Marijuana Program Monthly Report Arizona Department of Health Services | 2021-03 | 2026-08-17 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. ADHS weight covers the MEDICAL channel only, and no adult-use weight appears in any of the five Arizona artifacts this page reads, so the two agencies' series cannot be combined into a whole-market figure. |
Why each marker above says what it says
| Metric | Marker | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail sales | Partly comparable | Arizona's sales figures are the Department of Revenue's ESTIMATE of taxable retail sales, not a measured till total, and they are keyed to the month the transaction occurred. ADOR's own footnote: "Taxable Sales is estimated based on revenue received. The Taxable Sales for each period covered will change as late returns, late payments, amendments and audits are processed." Whether the figures are before or after customer discounts, and whether tax sits inside the base, are both undocumented; the search that established that is recorded in this file. |
| Medical / adult-use split | Partly comparable | The split is a TAX-CLASS split, not a per-transaction customer flag: ADOR reports taxable sales under business code 203 for retail medical and 420 for retail adult use, as filers classify them. That the classification can move is measurable in the series itself - the medical share shifts -21.8 points in a single month at 2025-08, which is a reclassification rather than a market event. Medical was 84.7% of taxable sales in 2021-01 and 11.5% in 2026-06. |
| Price per gram | Not like-for-like | Arizona publishes no price, and none can be derived here. The weight this page reads is ADHS's medical dispensary total, which blends marijuana, edible and other product ounces - an edible's ounces are the weight of the product, not of cannabis - and covers the medical channel alone: no adult-use weight appears in any of the five Arizona artifacts this page reads. The dollars that would sit above it are ADOR's estimate for the same channel, and they go negative when amendments land. A quotient of the two would not be a flower price per gram, so this file does not compute one - not for the cross-state chart and not for Arizona's own page. |
| Per capita | Partly comparable | Per-capita inherits every flag on the numerator, and Arizona's numerator is an estimate on an undocumented money and tax basis that is revised after publication. |
| Patient counts | Partly comparable | Active qualifying patient cards - a point-in-time stock, the same measure Maryland publishes. The caveat is the date, not the measure: ADHS states these tables are point-in-time and never says which day they are cut on, while the same edition's dispensary count is stamped the first of the following month. Attributed here to the report month. |
| Licence counts | Partly comparable | Licensed medical dispensaries, counted as of the first day of the month after the one the row is filed under - that is the date ADHS stamps on its own sentence. The count of facilities actually operating is published alongside and is a different number in most months; adult-use establishments are counted separately again. |
| Tax revenue | Partly comparable | Arizona's cannabis tax is two taxes on one sale: transaction privilege tax on both channels and a 16% excise on adult use only. The figure here is all of it, including the county, city and education shares, attributed to the month the transaction occurred. Arizona also publishes the same money keyed to the month it was RECEIVED; that series is on this page as its own field and the two are never mixed. |
What is checked on every run 12
| Check | Kind | Last result |
|---|---|---|
| Medical, adult-use, excise and EFT collections sum to Total Collections in the canonical table. | identity | Period-covered total collections: 25 of 67 periods differ, the largest by $1 at 2021-03, and the residual range is -$1 to $1. |
| Marijuana excise collected equals the excise taxable base times the 16% rate stated on ADOR's own landing page. The rate is read from that page on every run rather than hardcoded, so a statutory change re-bases the check instead of silently invalidating it. | identity | Excise collections against the base: 3 of 67 periods differ, the largest by -$1 at 2024-07, and the residual range is -$1 to $1. |
| The received-basis file's own total column against its four components. | identity | Received-basis total collections: 24 of 67 periods differ, the largest by $1 at 2021-02, and the residual range is -$1 to $1. |
| The eight jurisdiction shares - state general fund, education, county and city revenue sharing, city and county taxes, excise and EFT fees - sum to the row total. | identity | Jurisdiction decomposition: 42 of 67 periods differ, the largest by $2 at 2022-09, and the residual range is -$2 to $2. |
| Two independently published ADOR tables state the same received-basis total for every month. This is the strongest check in the file because neither table is derived from the other. | cross source reconciliation | Jurisdiction total against the category file: exact on all 67 periods - every residual is zero. |
| Every fiscal-year subtotal row reconciles to the sum of its own months, across all eight columns. Arizona's fiscal year runs July to June, so this also proves the month labels are being read into the right year. The grand-total row is a separate population and is checked separately - see pc_grand_total. | identity | Fiscal-year subtotals: 22 of 48 comparisons differ, the largest by -$2 at FY2023 taxable_excise_base, and the residual range is -$2 to $2. |
| The period-covered file's grand-total row reconciles to the sum of all its months, across all eight columns. This is a different population from the fiscal-year rows above - it spans a partial fiscal year at each end - and it misses by a different amount, so it gets its own measured sentence. | identity | Period-covered grand total: 8 of 8 comparisons differ, the largest by -$2 at Total taxable_medical, and the residual range is -$2 to $2. |
| ADHS publishes the active qualifying patient count three times in every edition - once in Table 1, once as an age decomposition in Table 2 and once as a county decomposition in Table 4. All three must agree exactly; there is no rounding to allow for. | identity | ADHS patient decompositions: exact on all 130 comparisons - every residual is zero. |
| Marijuana, edible and other ounces sum to the published total ounces in each edition's monthly table. | identity | ADHS monthly ounce components: 46 of 65 editions differ, the largest by +42.49 oz at 2021-03, and the residual range is -0.09 oz to +42.49 oz. |
| Each edition's year-to-date ounces against the running sum of the monthly figures published in that year's earlier editions. A non-zero residual means ADHS restated a month after publishing it, which is the measured evidence that this source revises. | cross source reconciliation | ADHS year-to-date against the sum of its own monthly figures: 47 of 55 editions differ, the largest by -5,191.06 oz at 2022-09, and the residual range is -5,191.06 oz to +38.79 oz. |
| ADHS publishes the same quantity in ounces and in pounds; the pounds are the ounces divided by 16. | identity | ADHS ounces against published pounds: 34 of 65 editions differ, the largest by -0.06 lb at 2023-12, and the residual range is -0.06 lb to +0.02 lb. |
| Whether Arizona's reported sales dollars are consistent with the quantity of cannabis sold. | unchecked | Not cross-checked. There is nothing to check them against. ADOR's dollars cover both channels and ADHS's ounces cover the medical one, the two agencies share no common figure, and the product mix inside ADHS's three weight categories is not published. This file says so rather than implying the sales series is corroborated by a quantity it is not. |
The regulator's own notes, and what is still open
The regulator's own notes
Period Covered is the month in which the transaction occurred, and is different than the month the tax revenue was received by ADOR.
— ADOR, MJ_byPeriodCovered.pdf footnote
Taxable Sales is estimated based on revenue received. The Taxable Sales for each period covered will change as late returns, late payments, amendments and audits are processed.
— ADOR, MJ_byPeriodCovered.pdf footnote
TPT category 420 is Retail Adult Use Marijuana, BC 203 is Retail Medical Marijuana, and MET is Marijuana Excise Tax.
— ADOR, MJ_byTotalCollectionsCategory.pdf footnote
Total Collections includes State, County, City and Education Tax TPT collections and Marijuana Excise Tax.
— ADOR, MJ_byTotalCollectionsCategory.pdf footnote
excise tax (16%) on the retail sales
— ADOR Marijuana Tax Collection page
Medical was 84.7% of taxable sales in 2021-01 and 11.5% in 2026-06. — Derived from ADOR taxable sales in this file
Open questions on this data
Unresolved definitional questions that gate something. Listed because a question nobody can see is a question nobody closes.
- What date do ADHS's Tables 1 to 4 describe? The report says they are point-in-time and never dates them, while the dispensary, establishment and laboratory sentences in the same edition are all stamped the first day of the following month. Closing it needs: Ask ADHS's Marijuana Program which date the active-cardholder tables are cut on, or watch for an edition that states it.
- Are ADOR's taxable-sales figures before or after customer discounts, and do they include the transaction privilege tax and the 16% excise in the base? Closing it needs: Ask ADOR's Office of Economic Research and Analysis for the methodology behind the Taxable Sales column, or wait for a published methodology note.