What farmland is worth, and what it rents for
USDA NASS land values and cash rents per acre, through 2026.
Rent-to-value calculator
Pick a place, a land type and a year. You get NASS's average cash rent and average value per acre for that same place, year and land type, and our ratio of the two. Where NASS doesn't publish both, the pair isn't offered. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah aren't offered: NASS footnotes their land values as excluding American Indian Reservation land (see the footnote), so their rents and values may not cover the same land.
$160
per acre per year
RENT, CASH, CROPLAND - EXPENSE, MEASURED IN $ / ACRE · US TOTAL · 2026 · VALUE 160 · LOAD_TIME 2026-07-31$6,020
per acre
AG LAND, CROPLAND - ASSET VALUE, MEASURED IN $ / ACRE · US TOTAL · 2026 · VALUE 6,020 · LOAD_TIME 2026-07-312.66%
gross, before taxes and costs
Data dates: each record's LOAD_TIME is in its excerpt. Verify any figure in NASS Quick Stats before acting on it.
$160 ÷ $6,020 × 100
| Year | Cash rent | Value | Ratio (ours) |
|---|
Try your own numbers
Type a rent and a value per acre to get the same ratio for them. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
What NASS's codes and columns mean
D Withheld to avoid disclosing data for individual operations.
S Insufficient number of reports to establish an estimate.
NA Not available.
Published data value or suppression reason code.
Ratio of the standard error to the estimate, expressed as a percent.
A concatenation of six columns: commodity_desc, class_desc, prodn_practice_desc, util_practice_desc, statisticcat_desc, and unit_desc.
Date and time indicating when record was inserted into Quick Stats database.
Our take written by Farming Land Sale
The calculator pairs a NASS cash rent with a NASS land value when both describe the same place, year and land type, and it offers no other pairs, so each one is published by NASS at the state, region or U.S. level. For U.S. cropland in 2026 the pair is $160 of cash rent and $6,020 of value per acre, which our calculation turns into a gross ratio of 2.66%.
That ratio leaves out property taxes, upkeep and financing, and NASS's values are averages, so it describes an average acre in the chosen place, not a particular field. County rents sit in their own explorer, because NASS publishes its land value estimates for the United States and by state, leaving no county value to pair them with.
Our reading of the USDA figures on this page. It adds no facts of its own and isn't advice about any parcel, lease or sale.
What the calculator pairs, and what it won't
For example, cash rent per acre values are calculated as the ratio of total rent paid to total acres rented.
For example, cropland value per acre can be estimated as a ratio of cropland value to cropland acres.
The reference date for the Agricultural Land Values and Technology Use Survey is April 1.
This survey provides the basis for estimates of the current year’s cash rents paid for irrigated cropland, non-irrigated cropland, and permanent pastureland.
Estimates are published for the United States and by State, except Alaska and Hawaii, and include the value per acre of all farm real estate, cropland, and pasture.
The pairing is strict: state cropland rent goes with state cropland value, never a county rent with a state value. County rents are in the county explorer on their own.
Method note How these figures are built
Data dates: the 2026 land values and 2026 state, region and U.S. cash rents carry LOAD_TIME 2026-07-31 (Released July 31, 2026, by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)
source); the 2026 county cash rents carry LOAD_TIME 2026-08-21. Records for earlier years have their own LOAD_TIME, shown in their field excerpts; LOAD_TIME is when NASS inserted the record into Quick Stats, not the year the figure describes. Verify any figure in NASS Quick Stats or the NASS report before you rely on it.
The NASS inputs are VALUE fields from the Quick Stats file qs.economics_20261017.txt.gz, shown as NASS prints them, in dollars per acre unless a column says otherwise; calculated figures and unit conversions (such as totals shown in millions) are labeled as ours. Our checker re-read all 23,311 records in NASS's current file on October 19 and matched the state, region and U.S. land values to the tables of the Land Values 2026 Summary. Percent changes, ratios, shares and counts are our calculations, labeled "ours". Nothing is adjusted for inflation. Full method →