Where Do Pistachios Grow? Production by Country, 2020-2026

Pistachios grow in hot, dry regions with cool winters, and the commercial crop is concentrated in a handful of them. On USDA's October 2026 figures, the United States, Iran and Turkey together grow 93.8% of the world's pistachios. The United States alone accounts for 63.3% of 2025/26 production, and has led the world in each of the last five crop years.

The tree is native to Central Asia and the Middle East, and the same demanding climate that suited its wild ancestors still decides where it can be farmed. What follows is the full USDA supply and trade table, with the working shown, plus a section on what USDA changed when it revised the year in October.

Which countries grow the most pistachios?

Five entries carry the whole world crop in USDA's accounting: the United States, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the European Union, which is mostly Spain and Italy. Everything else is recorded as zero.

Three things in that table are worth pulling out.

The concentration is tightening. The three-country share has gone 91.7%, 90.0%, 92.3%, 93.5%, 93.8%, rising in three of the four steps. Writing that the big three grow "roughly 90%" of the world crop was fair at the start of the decade and understates it now. An earlier version of this page made exactly that mistake, which is why the figure now carries a date and an edition.

The European Union is the only grower in the table that expanded every single year, from 24,815 tons to 50,000, which doubles it in four seasons. It is still small, about 4.4% of world output, but it is the one line with no down years in it. The October revision added 10,000 tons to the current European crop, and USDA calls it a record.

Syria has fallen by 53%, from 43,000 tons in 2021/22 to 20,000 now. It was the world's fourth-largest producer at the start of the series and now grows 2.8% of what the United States does.

What USDA changed in October

This is the part nobody else compiles, and it is readable straight off USDA's own page, because the October table prints the February column next to the October one.

In February USDA expected a record year for pistachio trade. In October it reported the opposite: world exports fell 11% on the previous season rather than rising 6%, which is a swing of 110,681 tons against the forecast. The nuts did not vanish. They went into American mouths and Iranian warehouses.

Four country revisions carry almost all of it:

• US domestic consumption rose 42%, from 225,000 tons to 319,563. That is the biggest single change in the table, and it is the first year USDA records US domestic consumption above 300,000 tons.
• Iranian ending stocks went from 5,000 tons to 70,000. Iran grew 25,000 tons more than forecast, carried in 10,000 more, and shipped 30,000 fewer. All of it piled up unsold.
• Chinese imports were cut 40%, from 125,000 tons to 75,000, which is roughly half what China bought in 2021/22.
• Turkish exports were cut 36.5%, from 75,000 tons to 47,600, and Turkish imports 19.6%.

Iran's stockpile is the figure worth watching. At 70,000 tons it is more than double any other year USDA prints, and because the marketing year ends in August it is the opening stock Iran carries into 2026/27, the season California's crop failed. So the world enters the failed American year with more unsold Iranian pistachio in store than at any point in this series.

Why the ranking moves every year

Pistachio trees bear in a heavy and light rhythm, an on-year followed by an off-year, and the three big producers are not in phase with each other. 2025/26 is the clearest case in the series: US production rises 44% while Turkey's falls 69%. The world total drops only 4%, because one country's on-year nearly covers a collapse elsewhere.

That out-of-phase pattern is why the American share of world production swings so hard without the country ever losing first place.

Turkey is the volatile one. Its share ranges from 10.6% to 32.7%, and of the four year-on-year steps in this window its crop more than doubled in one and fell by about two-thirds in two. There is no typical Turkish harvest to quote, which is worth knowing before citing one year's figure as a baseline.

Iran is the steadier line, and it is the one country whose share has risen in each of the last three years, from 12.0% to 19.9%. Its band spans 7.9 percentage points against the American 22.0, even though it grows well under half the American tonnage in every year.

Who buys the world's pistachios

Production tells you where the trees are. The import table tells you where the demand went, and it has moved sharply.

Hong Kong leads on percentage and is the row to treat carefully: the tonnage is small, it is largely a re-export point into mainland China, and USDA revised it from 2,000 tons to 11,000 in a single edition. The substantial growth is Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the EU.

China is the story in the other direction. It drove the previous decade of growth in pistachio trade and has now almost halved, from 143,600 tons to 75,000. Hong Kong re-exports into the mainland, so some of that may be rerouting rather than lost demand, but the sizes do not match: China is down 68,600 tons and Hong Kong up only 10,100. Most of the Chinese decline went somewhere else, and USDA publishes nothing that would say where.

Turkey is the odd one. It grows pistachios, exports pistachios, and has still more than doubled what it buys from abroad. It now imports 60,300 tons against a home crop of 120,000, and eats 188,300 tons domestically. A country with its own orchards is the world's third-largest pistachio importer, which fits the baklava and kunafa demand the trade press has been reporting, and the wider wave that Dubai chocolate set off.

We are describing a pattern in the figures, not proving a cause. USDA does not publish what the imports were used for.

Who ships them

Export supply is far more concentrated than production.

Two countries ship 90.0% of every pistachio that crosses a border, and the October revision tightened that: the February figures put it at 87.8%, because the cut fell hardest on Turkey.

Trade is also growing more slowly than the orchards. Between 2021/22 and 2025/26, both American on-years, world production rose 39% while world exports rose 16%. A smaller share of the crop crosses a border now than four years ago, which is the opposite of what February's record forecast implied.

World ending stocks stand at 311,593 tons against consumption of 1,070,863, which is about 3.5 months of cover and the thickest buffer in the five years. Across the series that figure runs between 2.8 and 3.5 months.

These figures still do not contain the 2026 crop failure

This is the single easiest mistake to make with USDA pistachio data, and it matters right now.

The marketing year begins in September. The 2025/26 column therefore holds the 2025 California harvest, which was a record 1.58 billion pounds. California's 2026 crop, the one that failed after record March heat disrupted pollination, falls into 2026/27.

We expected the October 2026 circular to carry it, and said so on this page. It does not. USDA prints a note on page 4 of that edition: "This publication only includes updated 2025/26 data for pistachios because U.S. production data for 2026/27 is not yet available." Almonds and walnuts both get a full 2026/27 forecast column in the same document. Pistachios get a revised 2025/26 instead.

So on 30 October 2026 there is still no USDA world dataset containing the failed California crop, and the next chance is the following semiannual edition, due around February 2027. Anyone quoting USDA world figures for "current" pistachio supply is quoting a world in which the 2026 crop failure has not yet happened. Our US pistachio price tracker carries the industry estimates for that crop, which run between 600 and 900 million pounds against 2025's 1.58 billion. The structural reasons that sit underneath any single bad season are set out separately, under why pistachios are expensive.

What the October edition does give is the opening position for that year: the world starts 2026/27 with 311,593 tons in store, 70,000 of them Iranian and 95,693 American. The American figure is 13.4% of the record crop that produced it, close to the bottom of the range in this series.

How USDA's two pistachio datasets line up

USDA publishes US pistachio production twice, in two different units, on two different calendars, and never prints the bridge between them. NASS reports utilized production by calendar crop year in thousands of pounds. FAS reports it by marketing year in metric tons. We checked whether they agree.

All six years are now the same number in two units. Five match exactly and one is a single ton apart, which is NASS rounding its own figure to the nearest million pounds. A FAS tonnage for the United States can be read straight back into NASS pounds, and the other way round.

The last row is the interesting one, because it closed. In February, FAS put the 2025/26 US crop at 712,682 tons, 3,994 tons below the NASS survey figure converted at the same rate, and we wrote that the gap was the distance between an industry delivery count and a government survey. In October FAS moved to 716,676, which is the NASS number to the ton. The forecast was built from processors' producer delivery reports and has now been reconciled to the survey.

Where do pistachios grow in the US?

Almost all American pistachios come from one state. California produces about 99% of total US output, concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley, with smaller commercial acreage in Arizona, New Mexico and a little in Texas. The American Pistachio Growers count more than 615,000 planted acres across 30 California counties and around 950 producers nationwide.

The scale is fairly new. California's first commercial crop in 1976 was about 1.5 million pounds; the 2025 harvest topped 1.5 billion. Pistachios overtook walnuts in 2021 to become the state's second-largest tree-nut crop by bearing acreage, and by 2024 they made up roughly 22% of California's tree-nut acres, behind almonds at about 62%.

The whole industry traces to a single trip. In 1929 the USDA botanist William E. Whitehouse collected pistachio nuts in Kerman, in Persia, now Iran. The "Kerman" cultivar selected from that material became the variety modern California orchards were built on. Today's largest producer started with seed from the nut's homeland, a point we take further in our comparison of Iranian and American pistachios.

Where are pistachios originally from?

Pistachios are native to Central Asia and the Middle East. Archaeobotanical and peer-reviewed genetic evidence places the wild range and domestication of Pistacia vera across southern Central Asia, in modern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, together with northern Iran and northern Afghanistan. People were eating wild pistachios remarkably early, with evidence going back roughly to 6750 BCE, and the earliest cultivated remains appear at Bronze Age sites in what is now Uzbekistan. Domestication is thought to have taken hold within the first millennium BCE, after which the tree spread west along Silk Road trade routes into the wider Mediterranean.

Afghanistan still has wild and cultivated pistachio, and it is absent from the USDA table above. That absence is a feature of the dataset rather than of the country, and we say more about it under Methodology.

Why do pistachios only grow in certain regions?

The climate demands are narrow, which is why orchards cluster. Pistachios need long, hot, dry summers, comfortable from about 25-38°C and tolerant of 40°C and above where there is soil moisture, paired with low summer humidity. They also need a genuinely cold winter: a stretch of chilling hours to break dormancy and crop properly. A deep taproot makes the tree strongly drought-tolerant.

That combination explains the map. Iran's high plateau, southeastern Turkey and California's Central Valley all deliver scorching dry summers and cold-enough winters. Humid and tropical climates fail on both counts, with too little winter chill and far too much disease pressure, and the trees are also vulnerable to spring frost and waterlogged winters.

The winter half of the requirement is specific enough to measure. Published figures put the main California cultivars between 700 and 900 hours below 45°F, and we compiled them side by side on our pistachio tree page. A region that cannot deliver those hours will grow the tree and never get a crop from it. For the biology underneath all of this, see what a pistachio actually is and how pistachios grow.

Methodology

What we compiled. Every cell of the Pistachio Summary table on page 7 of USDA FAS, Tree Nuts: World Markets and Trade, October 2026: production, domestic consumption, ending stocks, exports and imports, for each listed country and for the world, across the 2021/22 to 2025/26 marketing years. That table carries two columns for 2025/26, the February figure and the October one, and we compiled both, which is what the revision table is built from. The previous edition's full series, including the 2020/21 column that October drops, stays in the dataset under its own edition label. All figures are metric tons on an in-shell basis, which is USDA's own basis for this commodity.

Which edition. The October 2026 circular is the current edition on 30 October 2026. FAS publishes it twice a year and replaces the file at the same web address each time, so the PDF behind our source link will become a later edition. That is part of why the dataset below exists as a dated snapshot, and it is why we kept the February series rather than overwriting it.

How we checked it. We read the table from the PDF and then verified every column against its own printed total: six production columns, six consumption, six export, six import and six stock columns, thirty-six sums counting both 2025/26 columns. Every one reconciles exactly. We confirmed separately that supply balances against use in each of the four years where the October edition prints the previous year's ending stocks, to the ton. The five sections of the revision table each sum to their own world figure. And the pistachio narrative on page 3 gives seven checkable claims, on the 4% production fall, the Turkish and Syrian off-years, the record US and EU crops, Iran's third straight rise and highest output in five years, the 11% export fall, and which countries drove it. Each agrees with the table.

What we calculated ourselves. Share of world production, share of world exports, the four-year import changes, the three-country concentration share, months of stock cover, every figure in the revision table's Change column, and the NASS conversion. Everything else is USDA's own figure, unaltered. The conversion uses 0.45359237 kg per pound, the exact definition of the pound.

Limitations, and they matter for anyone citing this.

For China, India, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, domestic consumption equals imports exactly in every year. PSD is modeling those markets as consuming what they bring in, so those consumption figures are not independent measurements and should not be read as survey data.

World exports exceed world imports in every year, by between 17,979 and 68,392 tons, which is 2.8% to 11.9% of world exports. Trade data collected at two ends of the same shipment does not balance, and USDA does not reconcile it.

Production outside the five listed entries is recorded as zero. Afghanistan, Greece, Tunisia, Australia and Argentina all grow pistachios commercially and none of them appears. PSD tracks what matters to US trade analysis, so this is a trade dataset doing its job, not a census of world agriculture. Treat the world total as "world production USDA tracks".

FAS changes which countries get a printed row. The February edition gave Jordan its own import line, at 15,000 tons for 2025/26, and no line to Hong Kong. The October edition does the reverse. Jordan's tonnage is now inside "Other", which is why the February "Other" figure in our revision table is 74,000 rather than the 61,000 the February edition itself printed. Both columns of that table are taken from the October page, so the comparison is like for like.

The 2025/26 column is still the current year and FAS revises it, as this page now documents at length. Earlier years are estimates that have also been revised: between the two editions, Iranian production for 2022/23 moved from 106,000 tons to 92,000, and Iranian ending stocks for 2021/22 from 3,000 to 15,000.

Any comparison between the first and last year crosses the alternate-bearing cycle, so pick endpoints with care. 2021/22 and 2025/26 are both American on-years, which is why we measure the import and export changes across that window rather than from 2020/21, an off-year that would flatter the growth. The full series is in the dataset so you can pick your own.

The dataset

All three tables are free to reuse with attribution:

• World pistachio supply and trade, 2020/21 to 2025/26. 90 rows: five metrics across every country USDA tracks, in both the February and October 2026 editions, each row labeled with its edition.
• What USDA revised in 2025/26, February to October 2026. 45 rows pairing the two columns USDA prints side by side, with the change in tons and in percent.
• NASS to PSD crosswalk for US production. Seven rows pairing NASS utilized production in thousand pounds with the FAS PSD tonnage, including both the February and October figures for 2025/26.

Released under CC BY 4.0. Use it, and please link back.

Suggested citation: Ricci, E. (2026). Where pistachios grow: world production and trade, 2020/21 to 2025/26, compiled from USDA FAS. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/where-do-pistachios-grow/

Version history

• 2026-10-30, v2.1. Read the October 2026 circular, published 29 October, and moved every figure on the page onto it. Added the revision table and its dataset: world exports cut 16.2%, imports 17.1%, US domestic consumption up 42%, Iranian ending stocks up from 5,000 tons to 70,000. The three-country share is 93.8% on the new figures, not the 94.5% this page carried. Corrected our own prediction: we said this edition would be the first world dataset containing the 2026 California crop failure, and it is not, because USDA skipped the 2026/27 pistachio forecast for want of US production data. The NASS to PSD gap for 2025/26 closed to zero.
• 2026-10-26, v2.0. Rebuilt as a production and trade reference. Added the six-year USDA supply and trade tables, the share-of-production and import-growth calculations, the export concentration figure, the NASS to PSD crosswalk, and both CSV downloads. Corrected the page's own "roughly 90%" three-country share, which was 94.5% on the February 2026 figures, and its claim that the remaining tenth is spread across "Syria, Afghanistan, Spain and Italy": Syria and the EU are named rows in USDA's table and Afghanistan is not tracked at all. Added the marketing-year point that these figures predate the 2026 California crop failure.
• 2024-09-12, v1.0. First published.

Allergy note

Pistachios are a tree nut. This page is about where pistachios are grown rather than about eating them, but anyone with a tree-nut allergy should avoid pistachios and products made from them, including pistachio milk, butter and creamers, and check labels for shared-line cross-contamination warnings. See our guide to pistachio allergy for what the law requires a label to tell you. Pistachio milk made from nuts and water is naturally dairy-free and suits vegan diets, though being dairy-free does not make it safe for a nut allergy.