According to a new report, the number of full-time jobs in the legal marijuana industry has risen above 440,000 in the United States, despite recreational marijuana remaining illegal in the majority of states.
According to the report commissioned by Vangst and conducted by the analytics firm Whitney Economics, there was an increase of 22,952 marijuana-related jobs in the past year. The increase in full-time equivalent jobs “is supported by the $28.8 billion worth of legal cannabis products sold in 2023, an increase of $2.7 billion over the previous year.”
The 2024 Vangst Jobs Report found there are now 440,445 full-time jobs supported by legal cannabis in the US, a 5.4% increase over 2023. The report calls this “a positive sign that the industry is finding its footing after a rough couple of years.”
The report found that Michigan and Missouri saw the largest year-to-year increase in jobs, rising by around 11,000 full-time jobs each. Other states experiencing job growths include New York, New Mexico, Utah, Rhode Island, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut.
California remains the largest market for marijuana jobs with 78,618 in total. Despite such a strong market, this marks a 6% decrease from the total number of marijuana-related jobs in California in 2023. The other West Coast states, Washington and Oregon, also saw job losses.
“A countervailing pushback in mature markets in the American West (California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada) resulted in the loss of roughly 15,000 jobs across the region”, states the report. “The experience of buying legal weed in a retail store may also have lost some of its novelty”.
Despite losses in some states, the report strikes an optimistic tone, noting that they “expect losses in these markets to continue to thin out in 2024 and turn positive once again in 2025”.
According to the report, the legal cannabis industry “is expected to continue experiencing moderate growth in 2024. Overall revenue is projected to rise by 9% in 2024, with more expansion expected in 2025.
“When we started Vangst, there were less than 50,000 full-time employees in the cannabis industry. Less than a decade later, there are 440,445 full-time employees in cannabis, a number that will continue growing,” said Karson Humiston, Vangst Founder & CEO. “I am very proud of the work our team does to create the industry’s go-to-report, to examine jobs per state, something that the federal government does not do for our industry.”
