Tracking Cannabis in the National Accounts

The internationally agreed guidelines for national economic accounts explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be tracked together with legal market activity (United Nations Statistics Division 2025). This recommendation is not currently implemented by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis because of challenges inherent in identifying suitable source data (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis 2019) and differences in conceptual traditions (Carson 1984). But cannabis may soon be reclassified under federal law (Executive Order 14370 2025). In preparation for that possibility, this paper explores how tracking cannabis could impact the U.S. industry accounts, national accounts, and trade statistics. This paper is an update of a 2021 paper that was written before any cannabis reclassifications.

Cannabis-related output spans farms, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail sectors totaling over $150 billion in 2025. Some cannabis-related output is already included in the economic statistics, and so the net revision to gross domestic product (GDP) is smaller than the industry numbers given earlier. In the national accounts, tracking cannabis may raise the level of nominal GDP by 0.3 percentage point in 2025 and raise real GDP growth between 2010 and 2025 by 0.04 percentage point per year. In the trade statistics, tracking cannabis may lower the level of the nominal trade deficit by 1.4 billion in 2025 and lower the growth of the nominal trade deficit by 0.7 billion per year between 2010 and 2025. These tentative estimates are based on currently available information and subject to revision.