What an Acre of Arkansas Land Is Worth in 2026, by Region

Arkansas land prices per acre averaged $4,250 for farm real estate in 2025, with cropland at $3,720 and pasture at $3,370, per the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. Those three statewide numbers are the benchmark a seller compares a county offer against, and each rose a little over 3 percent from the year before.

Arkansas runs from the flat, irrigated rice ground of the Delta to the timbered hills of the Ozarks, so a statewide average is a weak guide to any one parcel. An acre in one region can sell for several times an acre in another. Below we break the 2025 USDA release down, walk two counties at opposite ends of the spread, and show why a lower per-acre price in Arkansas can still leave a seller with more cash than a higher price in another state.

This is general information about land valuation, not an appraisal or a tax opinion. For a parcel-specific number, a county assessor record and an Arkansas-licensed appraiser are the right places to start.

The 2025 USDA Numbers for Arkansas

Arkansas farm real estate averaged $4,250 per acre on January 1, 2025, with cropland at $3,720 and pasture at $3,370, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service Land Values Summary released August 8, 2025. Those three statewide figures are the reference points a seller measures a county offer against.

The USDA NASS Land Values Summary is published every August and covers values as of January 1 of that year. The 2025 report is the most current statewide benchmark available in 2026; the next release lands in August. Farm real estate, the all-in number that includes farm buildings, rose 3.4 percent from $4,110 a year earlier. Cropland on its own came in at $3,720, up 3.3 percent. Pasture trailed slightly at $3,370, up 3.1 percent. A rice-and-soybean operator in the Delta cares about the cropland number; an owner of a brushy creek bottom in the hill country is closer to the pasture line.

USDA groups Arkansas with Louisiana and Mississippi in its Delta States region, and Arkansas leads that group on farm real estate at $4,250, ahead of Louisiana at $3,850 and Mississippi at $3,580. On cropland alone the order flips, with Mississippi at $3,960 just ahead of Arkansas. Both numbers matter for a seller, because the all-in figure rewards counties with built-up farm infrastructure while the cropland figure isolates the dirt itself.

The five-year cropland trajectory

Source: USDA NASS Land Values, multi-year series. Arkansas cropland is up about 20.8 percent over five years. The growth has cooled from the 2022 spike but never turned negative, and the trend is steadier than the bigger jumps USDA recorded in Michigan and Tennessee over the same window, which we cover in our 2025 per-acre comparison across all nine states we buy in.

Arkansas owners working from an old appraisal should note the baseline shift. An owner who bought or inherited ground in 2020 or earlier is selling into a stronger absolute number today. Someone comparing offers to a 2022 appraisal is likely working from a value that has drifted a few hundred dollars per acre, and the drift runs in the seller’s favor.

Why Arkansas Cropland and Pasture Sit So Close Together

Arkansas pasture averaged $3,370 per acre in 2025, only about 9 percent below cropland at $3,720, an unusually tight gap. Nationally, cropland ($5,830) runs roughly three times pasture ($1,920). The two Arkansas categories nearly converge where the national ones split far apart.

Arkansas’s in-state premium is the part worth computing. We ran the two USDA series against each other: cropland carries just a $350-per-acre edge over pasture here, a 9 percent premium, against a national cropland premium near 200 percent. Arkansas pasture sits about 75 percent above the national pasture average, while Arkansas cropland sits about 36 percent below the national cropland figure. The categories meet in the middle in a way they do nowhere in the row-crop belt.

Arkansas geography drives that near-parity. Much of what USDA counts as state pasture is upland ground in the Ozarks and Ouachitas that carries timber, hunting, and rural-residential value on top of any grazing use, so it does not get discounted the way open rangeland does. At the same time, the national pasture average is dragged down by vast, arid Western grazing land that prices in single-digit hundreds per acre. Arkansas has very little of that. The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture documents how heavily the state’s row-crop economy concentrates in the Delta, which keeps the cropland figure from running away from everything else.

Arkansas sellers can draw one practical point from this. A non-cropped parcel, the kind of timbered or pasture tract that would be heavily marked down in Iowa or Nebraska, is not deeply discounted here. That is the opposite of the national pattern, and it is why a “we don’t farm it” parcel in Arkansas still has real value.

The Delta and the Ozarks: One State, Two Land Markets

Arkansas is conventionally split into five regions: the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, or Delta, in the east; the Ozark Plateau in the northwest; the Ouachita Mountains in the west-central part of the state; the Arkansas River Valley through the center; and the West Gulf Coastal Plain in the south. The statewide $3,720 cropland average is a blend of all five, and it describes none of them well.

Two Arkansas counties at opposite extremes show the spread plainly. The U.S. Census Bureau counts roughly three million residents across Arkansas’s 75 counties, much of it rural, and the 2022 Census of Agriculture county profiles capture how differently those counties use their land. Poinsett County in the Delta and Newton County in the Ozarks sit at opposite ends of that range.

Poinsett County in the Delta

Poinsett County had 289 farms across 348,782 acres in 2022, and 92.9 percent of that land, about 323,983 acres, was cropland, per USDA’s Census of Agriculture county profile. Roughly 271,652 acres, or 78 percent of the land in farms, was irrigated. The average farm ran 1,207 acres, and 39 percent of the county’s operations were 1,000 acres or larger. This is industrial-scale row-crop country.

The production numbers match. Poinsett farms sold $263.1 million in agricultural products in 2022, all of it crops, which ranked the county fifth in Arkansas for grains, oilseeds, dry beans, and dry peas. Average market value of products sold per farm was $910,479. Land like this, flat, drained, irrigated, and in active rice and soybean rotation, clears the state cropland average and often runs well past it. A buyer pays for water access, land leveling, and proven yield, not just the dirt.

Newton County in the Ozarks

Newton County tells the opposite story. It had 454 farms across just 86,152 acres in 2022, with cropland at only 15.9 percent, pastureland at 43.5 percent, and woodland at 37.2 percent, per its Census of Agriculture profile. Exactly 17 acres in the whole county were irrigated. The average farm was 190 acres, and 98 percent of the county’s agricultural sales came from livestock rather than crops.

This is Buffalo National River country: steep, forested, and recreational. Average market value of products sold per farm was $93,800, less than a ninth of Poinsett’s figure. A Newton County parcel is not priced off the cropland average at all. It prices on timber stand, road access, view, water frontage, and demand from buyers who want a recreational or homestead tract. Two parcels of identical acreage, one in Poinsett and one in Newton, can carry per-acre values that are not in the same conversation.

What the USDA Survey Leaves Out

USDA NASS measures only land in farms. A large share of Arkansas rural land sits outside that count: pine timber tracts in the West Gulf Coastal Plain, hunting and cabin parcels along the Buffalo and the Ouachita, severance-pending mineral acreage in the Fayetteville Shale footprint, and inherited family parcels long out of active use.

None of that land sits inside the $3,720 cropland figure, because none of it is classified as cropland. These parcels price on a different set of comparables. Southern pine timberland trades on stand age, species, and merchantable volume. Recreational tracts trade on access, terrain, and water. A 40-acre hunting parcel in the Ouachitas and a 40-acre rice field in Poinsett County share a state and almost nothing else once you start putting a value on them. When we look at an Arkansas parcel, our standard practice is to pull the county assessor record and overlay it on the USDA land-cover classifications before putting a written number on it, because the use code drives the comp set more than the county line does.

Land Value Versus What You Keep

Arkansas shows why a higher price per acre does not always mean more money in a seller’s pocket. The headline value is one question; the net proceeds after transfer tax, income tax on the gain, and closing costs are a separate one. Arkansas happens to be one of the friendlier states on all three.

The state real property transfer tax is $3.30 per $1,000 of consideration, about 0.33 percent, with no additional county transfer tax stacking on top under the standard framework (A.C.A. § 26-60-105). On the income side, Arkansas excludes 50 percent of a net long-term capital gain from state tax under A.C.A. § 26-51-815, documented on Form AR1000D. At the top 2025 individual rate of 4.4 percent, that puts the effective state rate on a long-term land-sale gain near 2.2 percent. Property taxes, at roughly 0.55 percent of value statewide, run well under the national average near 0.90 percent.

The result is that an Arkansas acre priced below ground in a higher-tax state can still net more at closing. A $4,000-per-acre parcel where the state takes 0.33 percent at transfer and 2.2 percent on the gain leaves the seller with a larger share than a $5,000 parcel in a state that taxes the full gain as ordinary income. Land value and net proceeds are two separate questions, and reading them together is where sellers find the real number.

Inherited Arkansas Land and the 2015 Heirs-Property Act

Arkansas rural acreage often changes hands through inheritance, which adds two wrinkles to valuation. The first is authority to sell. For modest estates, Arkansas allows a small-estate affidavit when the estate is valued at $100,000 or less, after a 45-day waiting period, under A.C.A. § 28-41-101, which skips formal probate entirely. Many inherited rural parcels qualify once encumbrances are netted out.

The second is co-ownership. Arkansas adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in 2015, codified at A.C.A. § 18-60-1001 and applying to partition actions filed on or after January 1, 2016. When co-owners disagree, the act gives the others a right to buy out a co-owner’s share at an appraised value and pushes courts to weigh open-market sale over a forced auction. We walk through how that statute compares with the other states we operate in over in our overview of heir-property laws across the states we buy in.

On the federal side, inherited land usually receives a stepped-up basis to its date-of-death value under IRC § 1014, covered in IRS Publication 559 and the statute text. For an heir who sells shortly after inheriting, that step-up often shrinks the taxable federal gain to little or nothing, which, paired with Arkansas’s 50 percent state exclusion, makes a near-date-of-death sale efficient. A tax professional should run the specific numbers, especially when the sale crosses into a new tax year.

What This Means for an Actual Arkansas Sale

The state cropland average of $3,720 is a starting reference, not an offer floor or ceiling. Where your parcel sits relative to that number depends on two things: the region it is in and how the land is actually used. Irrigated Delta cropland in active rotation clears the average and keeps going. An Ozark or Ouachita tract that is mostly woods and pasture prices on timber and recreational comps, which can land above or below the cropland figure depending on access and demand. The pasture-and-cropland near-parity means a non-farmed parcel is rarely the bargain-bin discount it would be elsewhere.

The honest way to value an Arkansas parcel is to read the state average through your parcel’s region and cover type, then layer in the tax picture to see what you actually keep. For the seller’s view of how we approach offers across the state, see what we pay for Arkansas land, which covers our process, the Delta-to-Ozarks range, and out-of-state-owner handling. When you want a written number on a specific parcel, send us the address and acreage and we return a fair cash offer in 24 hours, with closings in as little as 14 days on clear-title parcels across the nine states we buy in.

This piece reflects 2025 USDA NASS data and Arkansas tax and probate code as of June 2026. Christian Smith, Managing Partner at Perspective Properties LLC, reviewed the figures against the source releases and statutes.