10 States With the Highest Land Value Per Acre

Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California post the nation’s highest per-acre farm real estate values in 2026, according to USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. Iowa, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, and Illinois round out the top ten. Small, densely farmed Northeast states and coastal California lead because so little open land competes against so much nearby development pressure.

Which state has the highest land value per acre in 2026?

Rhode Island has the highest farm real estate value per acre in the country in 2026, at $23,600 an acre, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary, nearly $6,600 more per acre than second-ranked New Jersey. This is USDA’s annual release, published July 31, 2026, and it is the most current federal state-by-state benchmark available as of this writing.

USDA’s “farm real estate value” is the value at which all land and buildings used for agricultural production could sell under current market conditions, per the same report. It’s not a pure vacant-land figure since it folds in dwellings, barns, and irrigation systems, but it’s the only dataset that tracks every state on a consistent, comparable per-acre basis, and it’s the number cited most often when people talk about “land values” by state.

These figures come from USDA’s Agricultural Land Values Survey, fielded from April through June 2026 across roughly 30,000 farm operations nationwide, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary. Enumerators contact producers directly and record reported land values for cropland, pasture, and the operation’s total land and buildings, and NASS’s Agricultural Statistics Board then reviews and finalizes state and regional estimates before publication.

Source: USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary, July 31, 2026 (dollar figures rounded to the nearest $10-100 per USDA’s published precision).

For comparison, the U.S. farm real estate value averaged $4,500 per acre nationally in 2026, up 3.4 percent from 2025, according to the same USDA NASS summary. Every state in the top ten sits well above that national average, and most of them by a wide margin.

The bottom half of the top ten tells a different story than the top five. Iowa, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, and Illinois are all working farm states with large blocks of productive row-crop or orchard ground, not scarce commuter-belt remnants. Iowa’s $10,100 per acre reflects some of the most productive corn and soybean soil in the country, while Maryland’s $9,950 and Delaware’s $9,700 per acre, according to the same NASS report, sit closer to the Northeast pattern, blending strong Chesapeake-area cropland with proximity to the Baltimore-Washington and Philadelphia metro corridors. Ohio and Illinois round out the list on the strength of straightforward Corn Belt productivity rather than land scarcity.

Why do small Northeast states outrank major farm states like Iowa?

Small Northeast states outrank Corn Belt giants because they have very little farmland left and what remains sits close to expensive metro real estate markets, not because their soil out-produces Iowa’s. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut each report farm real estate values several times higher than Iowa’s, according to the USDA NASS 2026 Land Values Summary, despite having a tiny fraction of Iowa’s total farmland acreage.

USDA’s regional breakdown groups states into economic regions, and the pattern is clear: the Northeast region averaged $7,510 per acre in 2026, while the Corn Belt averaged $8,540 per acre and the Northern Plains averaged just $3,320 per acre, according to the same NASS report. Iowa alone, at $10,100 per acre, out-values every other Corn Belt state because it has the highest concentration of high-yield row-crop ground in the region, per NASS.

What’s happening in the Northeast is closer to a land-scarcity story than a farming-productivity story. A handful of remaining dairy, nursery, and vegetable operations in Rhode Island or Connecticut sit on acreage that would otherwise sell for suburban house lots or commercial redevelopment, so the “farm” value gets pulled up toward the non-farm value of the land underneath it. That’s a different dynamic than what drives value in Iowa or Illinois, where land is priced mostly on row-crop productivity and cash rent potential across large contiguous tracts.

This gap also shows up when you compare total farmland acreage against total dollar value. Iowa’s farm real estate was worth roughly $292.7 billion in total across the state in 2025, the most recent year with published totals, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary, spread across millions of acres of cropland. Rhode Island’s entire farm sector is a rounding error by comparison, both in acreage and in total dollars, which is exactly why a handful of remaining working farms near Providence can push the state’s per-acre average so high: there’s so little farmland left that the acres still in production are the acres closest to non-farm buyers.

How does cropland-only value change the ranking?

Stripping buildings out of the equation and looking at cropland value alone changes the order at the top, with California’s irrigated cropland overtaking New Jersey. California cropland averaged $18,430 per acre in 2026, ahead of New Jersey’s $17,100, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary, because California’s fruit, nut, and vegetable ground commands a premium tied to irrigation infrastructure and crop mix rather than nearby buildings.

Rhode Island ($34,300 per acre), Massachusetts ($26,600 per acre), and Connecticut ($23,200 per acre) still lead the cropland-only ranking by a wide margin, per the same NASS data, confirming that the scarcity effect in the Northeast holds even after buildings are excluded. Iowa’s cropland, by contrast, came in at $10,700 per acre and Illinois at $10,200 per acre, according to USDA NASS, reflecting large-scale row-crop production rather than land scarcity.

This distinction matters if you’re trying to estimate what raw acreage in your state is actually worth. A comparable sale of nearby vacant land will tell you far more about your parcel’s price per acre than a statewide average will, since state and even county averages blend wildly different land types together. Your county assessed value is also not the same thing as market value; assessments frequently lag behind what buyers are actually paying. For a fuller breakdown of how appraisers and buyers actually price land, see what land is worth.

What’s driving land values up even as farm credit tightens?

Land values are still rising nationally, but growth has slowed sharply and diverges by region, with Corn Belt land essentially flat while Great Plains ranchland hits new highs. Central Corn Belt farmland values were flat year over year in the second quarter of 2026, the slowest growth since late 2024, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s AgLetter as reported by Illinois Farm Policy News. In inflation-adjusted terms, the same district saw a 3.7 percent year-over-year decline, the steepest drop since the third quarter of 2016, per that report.

Credit stress is building alongside the slowdown. The share of farm loans with major or severe repayment problems in the Chicago Fed’s district reached 3.7 percent in 2026, up from 2.9 percent a year earlier and the highest reading since 2020, according to Illinois Farm Policy News’s coverage of the Chicago Fed’s AgLetter. Only 5 percent of lenders surveyed expect Corn Belt land values to rise in the third quarter of 2026, while 43 percent already consider farmland overvalued, per that same report.

Further west, the picture is different. Nonirrigated cropland values in the Kansas City Fed’s Tenth District rose about 1 percent and irrigated cropland rose about 4 percent year over year, while ranchland values grew roughly 7 percent to new record highs, according to Pro Farmer’s coverage of the Kansas City Fed’s Agricultural Credit Survey. Strong cattle revenue and government payments have helped offset softer row-crop income across the Plains, per that same report.

Taken together, the two district Fed surveys point to a land market that’s still holding value but no longer moving in one direction everywhere at once. A Corn Belt owner watching flat or slightly declining real values might read the market differently than a Plains rancher watching land hit record highs, even though both are technically inside the same national USDA average of $4,500 per acre reported for 2026. That’s a reminder that regional and even county-level conditions can diverge sharply from whatever the national or statewide headline number says in a given year.

What does this mean if you’re deciding whether to sell land?

A high statewide or regional average doesn’t set the price for your specific parcel; local comparable sales, access, zoning, and land type do far more of that work. If your land sits in a state like Rhode Island, New Jersey, or California, the statewide average reflects scarce, high-demand farmland and adjacent development pressure, not necessarily the value of a rural or recreational parcel three counties away from the nearest metro area.

Owning land in a high-average state doesn’t automatically mean your specific parcel is worth a premium, and owning land in a low-average state doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. A landlocked, unbuildable lot in New Jersey can still be worth less than a well-located recreational tract in a state with a much lower statewide average, because legal access, zoning, and buildable area drive individual parcel pricing far more than a state-level number ever will. That’s true whether the land is agricultural land, a rural homesite, or timberland sitting idle since it was inherited.

If you’re weighing your options, it helps to know what your land type typically commands and how buyers actually evaluate it. AMM Land Sales makes cash offers directly to owners of agricultural land, ranch and pasture, and raw acreage in all 50 states, including in high-value markets like California, New Jersey, and lower-cost row-crop states like Iowa. There’s no commission or fee to the seller, closing costs are covered, and any delinquent property taxes are settled out of closing proceeds through a licensed title company. AMM Land Sales contracts to purchase parcels for its own account and may assign those contracts to third parties; it is not a licensed real estate brokerage and does not represent buyers or sellers in a transaction.

Whatever your state’s average per-acre figure says, the number that matters is what a buyer will actually pay for your parcel, given its access, entitlements, and condition. Comparing your land against recent local sales of similar parcels, not a statewide or regional average, remains the most reliable way to get there.