USDA Land Values 2026: Record Highs, Slowing Growth

USDA Land Values 2026: Record Highs, Slowing Growth

USDA land values 2026 data shows farm real estate set a record in all nine states Perspective Properties buys in, yet growth slowed in every one of them. Values are still climbing. The rate of climb is not. That combination changes the arithmetic on whether waiting another year actually pays you.

The Land Values 2026 Summary from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service landed on July 31, 2026. Below is what it says about the nine states we work in, plus one calculation the agency does not publish and the trade press did not run.

The nine-state picture in 2026

Farm real estate value, the measure USDA uses for land plus buildings, ranged from $3,100 per acre in Texas to $7,000 per acre in Michigan across our nine states in 2026. Michigan holds the top spot for a third straight year, while Texas remains the most affordable entry point of the group.

All nine states in the 2026 table posted a gain. That has now happened in each of the last five USDA editions, which is worth keeping in view before reading the slowdown section that follows.

The number nobody published: growth slowed in all nine

USDA reports this year’s percent change. It does not report how that percent change compares with last year’s percent change, and that second derivative is where the 2026 release gets interesting. We ran it for all nine states plus the national figure, using the 2024, 2025 and 2026 columns from the same table.

Michigan, Tennessee and Texas all slowed, and so did the other six. Not one of the nine states, and not the United States as a whole, grew faster in 2026 than it did in 2025. Michigan decelerated hardest, dropping from 7.8 percent growth to 2.9 percent, a swing of nearly five percentage points in a single year.

Georgia is the near-exception, holding almost exactly its prior pace. North Carolina is close behind. Both sit in the Southeast, and both are absorbing steady residential demand that the interior farm states are not. The rest of the group bent downward together, which is the pattern you would expect from a rate-driven cooling rather than from anything local.

What is driving the slowdown

Federal Reserve farm-lending data points to borrowing costs as the main mechanism. Higher rates reduce what a buyer can finance on the same parcel, and that pressure shows up first in the rate of appreciation rather than in the price level itself. Farm income has also come off its 2022 peak.

Michigan’s near five-point drop fits that reading better than any local explanation. Cropland-heavy states that ran hardest through the 2021 to 2023 stretch have the most room to decelerate, and Michigan cropland had climbed from $4,960 to $6,350 an acre over those years before easing to $6,600 in 2026. Georgia and North Carolina barely moved off their prior pace, and in both the floor is set by residential demand rather than by row-crop economics, which is a steadier input.

What a slowdown does and does not mean

USDA recorded no state in this group losing ground, so deceleration is not decline. Values rose everywhere in the dataset. What changed is the size of the reward for waiting, and that is the only variable most landowners are actually deciding about.

Consider a 40-acre Michigan tract at the state average. At 2025’s pace of 7.8 percent, holding it one more year added roughly $21,800 of paper value. At 2026’s pace of 2.9 percent, the same year adds about $8,100. We have watched that gap talk people out of a sale and then quietly cost them the difference in carrying costs, because property taxes, mowing and liability do not decelerate along with the market.

Perspective Properties works through four questions when an owner asks whether to hold:

1. Compare the annual gain against the annual carry. If the state growth rate applied to your acreage is smaller than your tax bill plus upkeep, holding is costing you money in real terms.
2. Check whether your parcel tracks the state average at all. Timberland, wetlands and landlocked tracts routinely move at a fraction of the headline rate.
3. Price the exit, not the appraisal. Commission, survey, title curative work and any rollback tax come out of the number you are comparing.
4. Decide against a use, not against a chart. If the land is not earning, not being enjoyed and not slated for anything, the growth rate is the weakest of the four reasons to keep it.

Cropland versus pasture, and the two states where the order flips

Cropland at $6,020 per acre normally outprices pasture, because tillable ground generates income that grazing land does not. Nationally that held again in 2026, with pasture at $2,000 per acre, a threefold gap. Two of our nine states invert it, and both inversions got wider this year.

Georgia pasture averaged $5,100 per acre in 2026 while Georgia cropland averaged $4,670, putting grazing land $430 ahead. North Carolina shows the same reversal at greater scale, with pasture at $6,380 against cropland at $5,580, a gap of $800. Development pressure is doing this. Land that a buyer can see becoming lots is priced on that future, not on what it grows today, and pasture near a growing metro is exactly the parcel that gets that treatment. We cover the Georgia side of this in more depth in our Georgia land prices breakdown.

Georgia and North Carolina pasture owners should take a practical read from this: your ground may be worth more than a neighbor’s cropland despite producing less. Owners routinely assume the opposite and price themselves low. Georgia’s conservation use covenant and North Carolina’s present-use value program both complicate this further, since land enrolled for tax relief can carry deferred tax that surfaces at sale.

New Hampshire is the outlier in this dataset

New Hampshire cropland averaged $10,100 per acre in 2026, the highest figure among our nine states and more than $3,000 above Michigan, the next closest. New Hampshire farm real estate, at $6,670, sits second in the group. Pasture reached $8,120, roughly four times the national pasture average. Scarcity drives all three numbers.

New Hampshire has very little tillable acreage relative to its land mass, so the small share that qualifies as cropland is priced accordingly. A second detail is easy to miss in the tables. USDA withheld New Hampshire cropland values as undisclosed for 2022, 2023 and 2024, and only began publishing them again in 2025. Anyone building a New Hampshire trend line off this release has two data points, not five, and should treat the direction as provisional. Our New Hampshire land page covers what those values mean for Carroll and Grafton county sellers specifically.

What the per-acre average will not tell you about your parcel

USDA state averages describe states, not a specific tract, and the distance between the two is where most seller disappointment lives. USDA builds these figures from a survey of farm operators, so the sample skews toward working agricultural ground rather than the idle, wooded or landlocked parcels that people most often inherit.

A landlocked 20 acres with no recorded easement is the single biggest divergence we see, and it can trade at a steep discount to the state cropland average no matter how good the soil is. Wetlands designation, unresolved heirs, a clouded chain of title and back taxes each pull the same direction. Perspective Properties buys in all nine of these states for cash, we make a written offer within 24 hours, and we can close in as little as 14 days on a clear-title parcel. When we price a tract, we start from the state figure and then adjust for the specific facts, because the trio we see again and again, no access, no clean title, no recent survey, never shows up in a USDA average.

How this release compares with last year

Last year’s edition put United States farm real estate at $4,350 per acre. We wrote that dataset up in our 2025 land prices comparison, and the 2026 figures now supersede those numbers state by state. The older piece is still the right reference for the 2022 through 2025 trend.

USDA changed its release month in 2026, which is worth flagging for anyone tracking this series. The agency published the summary on July 31, whereas the previous fourteen editions all carried an August date, a pattern visible in the USDA ESMIS release archive. The report arrived about a month early, which matters only if you are comparing release timing across years, but it is the kind of thing that makes a year-over-year script quietly miss a file.

Taxes are the other half of the number

IRS rules, state transfer taxes and any deferred agricultural assessment all sit between the sale price and your proceeds, so the per-acre value is not the amount you keep. Inherited land usually gets the most favorable treatment of the three, because the basis resets to fair market value at the date of death under IRS Publication 551.

State-level programs are where sellers get surprised. Tennessee’s greenbelt classification, administered through the state comptroller, Michigan’s taxable value rules under the state treasury, Alabama’s current-use valuation and Texas open-space appraisal each reduce the annual tax bill while the land stays in qualifying use, and each can claw back several years of the difference when that use ends. We price that rollback exposure in up front rather than letting it appear at closing, and it is the most common reason a seller’s net comes in under what the state average suggested.

Perspective Properties will read a specific parcel rather than a state average, so our team will look at yours and tell you plainly what it is worth to us.