At a glance
Where the market is heading
Vermont's licensed market opened in October 2022 with eleven retailers filing a return and $2.6m in sales. It has grown roughly fivefold since, and has been broadly flat through 2025 and 2026 at around $13m a month.
Retail sales reported, by month
These are tax-return figures, not measured sales. Every number here is a line a retailer wrote on a Vermont Cannabis Excise Tax return. A seller not registered for that tax does not appear at all, and the Department of Taxes says its figures are preliminary for 45 days after each month ends and are “subject to change with subsequent updates”.
The two lines are close because exemptions are small. Tax-exempt sales run between 0.6% and 5.1% of the total. The gap between them is not the medical market — see below.
Excise tax is not drawn here. It is exactly 14% of the taxable line, reconciling to within five cents in the worst of 45 months, so a chart of it would be the same shape twice. The cumulative figure is in the tiles above.
Before or after discounts is unknown. The Department publishes no definition of its sales columns, so whether these are gross or net of retailer discounts is not documented. Where another state publishes both, the difference has been as large as 24%.
Taxable and tax-exempt
This is the closest thing Vermont publishes to a medical/adult-use split, and it is not one. A sale is exempt from the cannabis excise tax when a medical dispensary or a medically-endorsed retailer sells to a registered patient — but also when the buyer is a government body, or in any other case where Vermont lacks the authority to tax the purchaser. The Department publishes no breakdown between those, so the exempt slice is an upper bound on medical sales and nothing more. Vermont does not appear on this site's medical-share comparison for that reason.
Reported sales by tax status
How many shops are trading
The Department of Taxes publishes the number of returns filed each month, which is the closest available proxy for how many shops were actually trading. It rose from 11 at launch to a peak of 109 in October 2025 and has eased back since.
Retailers filing a return, by month
A filer is not a licence. The Cannabis Control Board licensed 112 retailers as of its 29 July 2026 snapshot, against 104 returns filed for June. The two need not match: a licence held by a shop that has not opened files nothing, and until 1 July 2026 an “integrated licensee” could file a cannabis excise tax return without holding a retailer licence at all. Act 176 of 2026 abolished that licence type, so this count changes meaning from July 2026 onward.
Vermont keeps no licence history. The Board replaces its licence file rather than versioning it, so the licence counts on this site are a single dated snapshot and cannot be drawn as a line.
Common questions
Is this everything sold in Vermont?
No, and the difference is worth understanding. These are the sales figures retailers reported on a cannabis excise tax return, so the series covers businesses registered for that tax. Medical sales are exempt from the tax and appear only as exempt sales, and only where the seller reports them — whether a dispensary that makes no taxable sales files a return at all is not something the Department states. Unlicensed sales are not here in any form.
Why is there no medical versus adult-use split?
Because Vermont does not publish one. The only division available is taxable against tax-exempt, and exempt covers medical patients, government purchasers and anyone else Vermont cannot tax, with no breakdown between them. Presenting that as a medical share would be reading a tax rule as a customer type.
Why is there no price per gram?
Vermont publishes no weight, no units and no product categories anywhere — the excise tax workbook has six columns and none of them is a quantity. The state does hold the underlying track-and-trace data, and a market study commissioned by the Cannabis Control Board in February 2026 reported flower prices from it, but that is a one-off report rather than a series. There is nothing to derive a monthly price from.
How current is this?
The Department of Taxes publishes about 45 days after a month ends — returns are due on the 25th of the following month — and says the first release of each month is preliminary and may be revised. The figures here are checked against the workbook's own “last updated” date rather than against the file simply being available.
Does the month mean when the sale happened or when the tax was paid?
When the sale happened. The column is headed “Monthly Filing Period”, which reads like a payment date, but the Department's tax guide is explicit that a return covers “sales made in the preceding calendar month” — June's sales are filed by 25 July. So these are calendar months of trading, and they line up with other states' monthly figures.
Dispensaries and licences in Vermont — 546 licence records listed, from Vermont Cannabis Control Board.
Where these figures come from
Sourcing, basis and comparabilityVermont licenses two things separately and publishes them through two agencies. The Cannabis Control Board licenses cannabis establishments and runs the medical programme; the Department of Taxes collects the 14% cannabis excise tax and is the only one of the two that publishes a monthly series. Medical patients are exempt from that excise tax, so the figures on this page are the sales retailers reported on an excise-tax return - which is close to, but not the same as, everything sold at licensed retail in Vermont.
Basis — Sales reported on the Vermont Cannabis Excise Tax return, by sales month
- Measurement
- tax_derived
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- excl
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- adult_use, medical
- Rounding
- Values carry cents. Excise tax equals 14% of taxable sales to within $0.05 across the whole series, the residual being per-return rounding by up to 109 separate filers - which is why the rate identity is gated at $1.00 and not at zero. Floats arrive from the workbook with IEEE-754 tails (13009599.380000001) and are rounded to cents on read, or the decomposition identity would fail on the representation rather than on the data.
The regulator's own words: GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026. Rate: "Vermont applies a fourteen percent (14%) excise tax on the retail sale of cannabis and cannabis products." Tax basis: "Both cannabis excise tax and sales and use tax are calculated on the product price only." Scope: "Note that buying or selling cannabis for resale (such as a sale from a cultivator to a retailer) is not subject to cannabis excise tax because the transaction is not a retail sale." Exemptions: "A sale is exempt from cannabis excise tax if it is (1) made by a licensed medical cannabis dispensary or any retailer licensed with a medical-use endorsement and (2) made only to a registered qualifying patient or through a registered caregiver. A sale is also exempt if Vermont lacks the authority to impose tax on a purchaser."
Why an axis above reads unstated: Checked negative, 2026-08-16. Full-text search of GB-1313 'Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide' (August 2026 edition, 20 pages, 37,693 characters, cached at raw/GB-1313_cannabis_tax_guide.pdf) returned ZERO occurrences of 'gross', 'net of', 'net ', 'rebate', 'coupon', 'loyalty', 'methodolog' and - notably - of the phrase 'total sales' itself. 'discount' occurs exactly once, and only in the bundled-transaction rule ('Any discounts applied to the bundle must be attributed to the products that are not subject to cannabis excise tax'), which is about allocating a discount between taxable and exempt components, not about whether the reported sales figures are before or after retailer discounts. The workbook itself carries no notes tab, no definitions and no methodology cell - its only non-data content is a title and a Last Updated date. So whether Total Sales is gross or net of discounts is undocumented, and money is 'unstated' rather than inferred from general retail practice. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Derivation. sales_total = sales_taxable + sales_non_taxable, both as written by the retailer on the Vermont Cannabis Excise Tax return. No arithmetic of ours produces any published figure - every value in this file is read from a workbook cell. The basis is flagged tax_derived because the SCOPE of the series is defined by the excise tax rather than by a retail census: what is in it is what a CET filer reported. Error: Not a numeric error - a scope one, and it runs in two directions. (a) The series omits any licensed retail activity by a seller not registered for the cannabis excise tax; the Department of Taxes publishes no count of registrants against which that could be measured. (b) Medical sales are exempt from the tax and enter only as Non Taxable Sales, and only where the filer reports them - GB-1313 says "The medical sales must be recorded as exempt sales on your sales tax and cannabis excise tax returns." but whether a dispensary that makes no taxable sales at all holds a CET account and files a return is not stated anywhere fetched. So medical coverage is present but of unknown completeness, which is tracked as an open question rather than assumed either way..
Basis — Active cannabis establishment licences, CCB snapshot, point in time
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- point_in_time
- Scope
- all_tiers
- Geography
- statewide
- Rounding
- None - integer counts.
The regulator's own words: The workbook is titled 'Active Licenses Report' and its earliest expiration date is the snapshot date itself, which is consistent with a filter to licences active on the day it was generated.
Sources 2
| Role | Source | Format | From | Last verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Cannabis Excise Tax Statistics Report Vermont Department of Taxes | xlsx | 2022-10 | 2026-09-05 | One sheet, six columns, the entire history in every release - which is why the revision pattern is a full rebuild. The Department also renders the same data in a PowerBI embed on its statistics hub (app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiOWRjNTI1NzEt...). That embed is the same numbers in a different wrapper, so it is NOT registered as a cross-check: showing one source twice does not corroborate it. |
| Cross-check | Licensed Cannabis Establishments - Active Licenses Report Vermont Cannabis Control Board | xlsx | current snapshot only | 2026-09-05 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. 104 CET filers for the 2026-06 period against 112 active Retailer licences in the 2026-07-29 CCB snapshot. |
Why each marker above says what it says
| Metric | Marker | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail sales | Partly comparable | Vermont's figure is the sales retailers reported on a cannabis excise tax return, not a measured retail total: a seller not registered for that tax is not in it at all, and medical sales appear only as exempt sales where the seller reports them. It is a calendar-month sales figure excluding tax - the guide says both taxes are calculated on the product price only - but whether it is before or after retailer discounts is not documented anywhere the Department publishes. |
| Medical / adult-use split | Not like-for-like | Vermont publishes no channel split. The taxable / non-taxable division looks like one and is not: medical patients are exempt from the excise tax, so medical sales do land in the exempt column, but so do sales to government purchasers and any other buyer Vermont cannot tax, and the source publishes no breakdown between them. It is a tax-exemption proxy, ANCHORS 5 names Vermont for exactly this, and a proxy is not a split. |
| Price per gram | Not like-for-like | No price, no weight, no units and no product categories exist anywhere in Vermont's published output. The excise tax workbook has six columns and none of them is a quantity. Vermont does hold the underlying track-and-trace data - the CCB's own February 2026 market study reports median and weighted-average flower prices from it - but that is a one-off consultant report, not a series, and there is nothing to derive a monthly price from. |
| Per capita | Partly comparable | Per resident, and it inherits every caveat on the numerator: the numerator is excise-tax-return sales, not measured retail. Vermont is also a small state bordering three legal markets, and no published Vermont figure separates visitor spend - unlike DC, where the non-resident share is measured, here it is named and not quantified. |
| Patient counts | Not like-for-like | Vermont publishes no patient count. The Cannabis Control Board's Medical Cannabis Program page carries programme information and a medical-ID verification lookup and no figure of any kind; its legislative report series stopped in January 2025; and there is no Vermont cannabis dataset on data.vermont.gov. Checked 2026-08-16. |
| Licence counts | Partly comparable | A single dated snapshot, not a series: the CCB publishes the current Active Licenses Report and keeps no history, so Vermont can be compared at a point in time and cannot be drawn as a line. The count is of LICENCES rather than open premises - a licence held by a shop that has not opened is in it - which is why it does not match the number of businesses filing an excise tax return. |
| Tax revenue | Partly comparable | A 14% retail excise on the pre-tax product price, by sales month. It is tax owed on that month's sales rather than cash received in it, because the return is filed by the 25th of the following month. Vermont's 6% sales tax and any local option tax apply to the same sales and are not in this figure. |
What is checked on every run 4
| Check | Kind | Last result |
|---|---|---|
| Total Sales must equal Taxable Sales plus Non Taxable Sales. The workbook publishes all three, so the sum is checkable without any assumption. | identity | 45/45 exact, worst $0.00 (2026-08-14 release) |
| Excise tax must equal 14% of taxable sales. GB-1313: "Vermont applies a fourteen percent (14%) excise tax on the retail sale of cannabis and cannabis products." The rate is also SOLVED from the data every run and required to sit inside 0.1395-0.1405, so a legislated change fires this gate rather than quietly rescaling the series (SOURCE_CONTRACT B.2). | identity | implied rate 0.13999999-0.14000000 across 45 months; worst residual $0.05 |
| The count of businesses filing a cannabis excise tax return, against the count of active Retailer licences in the CCB snapshot. They are two agencies counting two things on two dates and are NOT expected to agree; the check exists to notice a gap wide enough to mean something changed. | cross source reconciliation | 104 filers (2026-06) vs 112 Retailer licences (2026-07-29), ratio 0.93 |
| Vermont's headline sales figure is not cross-checked against any second measurement. | unchecked | Not cross-checked. Both identities above live inside a single Department of Taxes filing, so they check the workbook's internal consistency and nothing more. No other Vermont source publishes retail sales: the Cannabis Control Board's report series stopped in January 2025, its licence portal carries no sales data at all, and data.vermont.gov has no cannabis dataset. The Department's own PowerBI dashboard renders the same workbook. This matters because DC's headline is over-determined by two independent in-document identities and Vermont's is not - the two pages should not read as though they carry equal rigour. |
The regulator's own notes, and what is still open
The regulator's own notes
Vermont applies a fourteen percent (14%) excise tax on the retail sale of cannabis and cannabis products.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 3
Retailers are required to file a cannabis excise tax return on or before the 25th of every month for sales made in the preceding calendar month. For example, a return for sales in June must be filed by the 25th of July.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 5
Both cannabis excise tax and sales and use tax are calculated on the product price only.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 5
A sale is exempt from cannabis excise tax if it is (1) made by a licensed medical cannabis dispensary or any retailer licensed with a medical-use endorsement and (2) made only to a registered qualifying patient or through a registered caregiver. A sale is also exempt if Vermont lacks the authority to impose tax on a purchaser.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 6
The medical sales must be recorded as exempt sales on your sales tax and cannabis excise tax returns.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 7
Note that buying or selling cannabis for resale (such as a sale from a cultivator to a retailer) is not subject to cannabis excise tax because the transaction is not a retail sale.
— GB-1313 Vermont Cannabis Tax Guide, August 2026, page 3
Preliminary data will be available 45 days after the end of the filing period. Data are subject to change with subsequent updates.
— Vermont Department of Taxes, Cannabis Excise Tax Statistics hub
Cannabis retailers and integrated licensees are required to collect the excise tax from purchasers at the time of a taxable sales transaction. These are the only two types of businesses allowed to make retail sales of cannabis.
— Vermont Department of Taxes, Cannabis Excise Tax Statistics hub
Open questions on this data
Unresolved definitional questions that gate something. Listed because a question nobody can see is a question nobody closes.
- What is actually in the Non Taxable Sales column, and is medical coverage complete? GB-1313 puts medical sales, government purchasers and 'occasions where Vermont lacks the authority to impose tax' in one exempt bucket with no published breakdown. Separately, it is not stated anywhere fetched whether a licensed medical dispensary that makes no taxable sales holds a cannabis excise tax account and files a return at all - so whether Total Sales covers all Vermont medical retail, some of it, or almost none of it is unknown. Blocks: med_adult_split. Closing it needs: Ask the Department of Taxes (tax.business@vermont.gov, 802-828-2551) for the line definitions of the CET return and whether medical-only dispensaries are registered filers; or request the return form's instructions, which are not on the public site.
- Is Total Sales gross, or net of retailer discounts? GB-1313 never uses the phrase 'total sales' and contains no occurrence of 'gross' or 'net of'; the workbook has no notes tab. Utah shows this is worth 24% where it is published, so it is not a rounding-level question. Closing it needs: Request the CET return line instructions from the Department of Taxes. This does not gate the join - DC's money basis is unstated and DC is an anchor - so the flag stays 'unstated' and the caveat says so until answered.
- The CCB's February 2026 market study says "Since retail sales launched in October 2022, licensed cannabis sales have exceeded $262 million through October 2025." The Department of Taxes series totals $388,480,122 for that window - 48% higher - and $262,891,859 through December 2024. Is the study's window mislabelled, its measure narrower than total reported sales, or is it counting something else entirely? Closing it needs: Ask the Cannabis Control Board which dataset and which window produced the figure. Until then it is listed in headline.disallowed_substitutes and never published as Vermont's total.