US Pistachio Prices: Tracker & 10-Year Data (USDA + BLS)

Every pistachio price story of the last two years — Dubai chocolate, "shortage", $20 pistachio spreads — eventually needs an actual number, and the numbers are scattered across USDA PDFs and a BLS database. This page puts them in one place: the official US grower price per pound back to 2016, production and crop value alongside it, and the monthly producer-price index for the months in between annual reports. The index data refreshes automatically from the BLS public API; the annual figures are updated each May when USDA publishes its Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts Summary. Both tables are downloadable as CSV, free to reuse with attribution (citing this page).

The headline numbers

• Grower price, 2025 crop: $2.48 per pound (+10.2% vs 2024) — the marketing-year average US growers received, per USDA.
• Still below the peak. Despite two years of rises, the price remains −11.7% below the 2019 record of $2.81/lb.
• A record crop. 2025 utilized production was 1.58 billion pounds — the largest in the decade of USDA data compiled here, up 44% from the small 2024 crop.
• A record value. The 2025 crop was worth $3.92 billion, the highest in this series.
• The 2026 signal so far: the BLS pistachio producer-price index stood at 235.4 in June 2026 (+9.8% year-on-year).

The 2026 crop: a genuine supply shock

Everything else on this page is official published data. This section is the exception, and it is flagged as such: USDA will not publish an official 2026 figure until its Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts Summary in May 2027, so the numbers below are industry estimates, each attributed and dated. We report what others have published; we don't forecast ourselves.

For comparison, USDA recorded 1.58 billion pounds utilized in 2025 — a record. An 800-million-pound crop would be roughly half of that, and around 27% below the previous "off" year of 2024 (1.10 billion lb).

What happened. An unusually early bloom in March met record heat. Pistachio pollen loses viability above roughly 85°F; temperatures exceeded that across California's main production region and approached 100°F in places. Male trees blossomed before the female trees were receptive, so flowers went unfertilised — Elizabeth Fichtner, a UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor in Tulare County, notes that 14 to 15 pollen grains per flower are needed for fertilisation. The result is "blank" nuts: shells that never filled. Growers report blank rates as high as 80%, against a normal 15–20%.

Why it matters for price. Stephen Vasquez, executive director of the Administrative Committee for Pistachios, has advised buyers to secure supplies early, warning that "there is going to be a tight supply." Two pieces of context the headline number doesn't carry, though. First, pistachios alternate-bear by nature — 2026 was always going to be a light year, so the honest comparison is against the 2024 off-year (1.10 billion lb), not the record 2025 crop. Second, any 2026 rise starts from a lower base than most coverage implies: the 2025 grower price of $2.48/lb was still below the 2019 peak of $2.81. Watch the monthly producer-price index below for the first hard evidence of how much of this reaches actual transaction prices.

What price is this, exactly?

Two different official measures, and it matters which one you quote:

• The USDA grower price is the average price received at the farm gate across a marketing year, published annually. It is not a shelf price — retail pistachios cost several times more, and no official US retail series exists.
• The BLS producer-price index tracks the selling prices US producers receive, monthly, as an index rather than dollars. Because most of a pistachio crop is priced around harvest, the index moves in steps and can sit flat for months; recent values are preliminary and revised for up to four months.

US pistachio prices, production and value since 2016

Source: USDA NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts Summary releases (each row uses the latest revised figure; per-row source releases are in the CSV). California accounts for effectively the entire commercial US crop, so California = US in this table. USDA revises recent years in later releases — the 2024 price, for example, was first published as $1.86 and later revised to $2.25.

Three things stand out in the series. Acreage has more than doubled since 2016 (239,000 → 521,000 bearing acres) — supply is structurally growing. Yields alternate: pistachio trees naturally swing between heavy and light years, which is why production sawtooths. And price follows the cycle inversely — big crops (2023, 2025) fetch less per pound than the short 2024 crop's mid-cycle price, with demand shifts layered on top.

The monthly signal: producer-price index

Data through June 2026, fetched from the BLS public API; index values, not dollars. The full monthly series back a decade is in the monthly CSV.

What's actually driving pistachio prices?

The demand story is real: the Dubai-chocolate wave that went viral from late 2024 strained global pistachio supply, and the US grower price rose 33% across 2023–2025. But the popular "shortage" framing misses two supply-side facts in the USDA data: 2025 was a record US crop, and growers still earn less per pound than they did in 2018–2020, before Dubai chocolate existed. What changed is that surging demand met the bottom of a multi-year price decline — prices are recovering, not exploding past all precedent.

That was the 2023–25 picture, and it is worth keeping straight, because 2026 is a different situation. Until now the pressure came from demand meeting a growing supply. This year, for the first time in this series, the constraint is genuinely on the supply side: a crop roughly half the size of last year's, caused by heat rather than by anything happening on TikTok. Both things can be true — the "shortage" reporting of 2025 outran the data, and the 2026 shortfall is real. If the price at the till still stings, remember the farm gate is a minority of it: processing, retail margin and the premium on branded products (like pistachio milk at $4.66–$9.65 per litre) sit on top.

Methodology, updates and corrections

Annual figures are transcribed from USDA NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts Summary PDFs, using the most recent revision of each year (per-row source links in the CSV). Monthly index values are fetched from the BLS public API by an automated job; BLS marks recent months preliminary, and this page inherits any BLS revisions at its next refresh — "data through" above always tells you the current coverage. The annual table is updated each May when USDA publishes the next summary. We don't forecast, and we don't adjust for inflation — these are nominal prices as published. The one section that reports figures which are not yet official — the 2026 crop — says so explicitly, attributes every estimate to the body that published it, and will be replaced with USDA's own figure when it lands in May 2027. Spot an error, or need the data sliced differently? Email us via the about page.

Citing this page

You're welcome to cite or republish this page's tables and annual / monthly datasets, including commercially, with attribution to pistachiomilk.org and a link here (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0). The underlying USDA and BLS figures are public domain — cite them directly where possible; this page adds the compilation, revision-tracking and per-litre context. Suggested citation:

Ricci, E. (2026). US Pistachio Prices: Tracker & 10-Year Data. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/pistachio-prices/

Version history: v1.1, 10 August 2026 — added the 2026 crop section (industry estimates, clearly separated from official data), revised the shortage FAQ, added a 2026-crop-size FAQ, and added four 2026 crop sources. v1.0, 10 August 2026 (USDA series 2016–2025; BLS index through June 2026). Index data refreshes monthly; material changes are noted here.