What an acre of American land is actually worth, county by county. Built on the full USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture across 3,072 counties, summarized into the figures below. Free to read, free to cite.
Each figure is computed from USDA data and free to quote with attribution.
Sorted into bands, most US counties cluster in the middle. The truly cheap land, under $1,000 an acre, is rare and almost entirely in the dry West and northern Plains. The expensive tail is farmland near cities. Share of all 3,072 counties:
Pool every county in each Census region and the order is consistent: land gets cheaper as you move west and rural, more expensive toward the dense Northeast. Median value per acre by region:
By median across the state's counties.
Small, dense states top the list.
The averages hide enormous local range. California counties span $961 to $61,295 an acre, a 64x gap inside one state. New Mexico runs $379 to $24,134. The lesson for a seller: a state or even regional average tells you very little about a specific parcel. The county figure gets closer, and the exact number needs the parcel itself. Widest within-state spreads:
New York and Alaska show the largest ratios, driven by a single urban or extreme county; the figures above are kept honest by noting that. The cleaner story is states like California and New Mexico, where ordinary rural and near-town land differ many times over.
A handful of dense urban counties show six and seven figure per acre values because only token farmland remains there; those are held out as outliers. See the full searchable data in the Price Per Acre by County index.
Free to cite and reuse under CC BY 4.0, with credit to FrontierAcre and USDA NASS. A line you can quote as is:
The median US county values farm real estate at $4,382 an acre, only 2% average under $1,000, and the rural West (median $2,880) is less than half the Northeast (median $6,536). (FrontierAcre, The State of US Land Values 2026, USDA NASS data.)
Drop the headline on your own page. Click to select, then copy:
Suggested citation: FrontierAcre (2026). The State of US Land Values. frontieracre.com/us-land-value-report.html. Built on the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture.
Every figure is computed from the United States Department of Agriculture's 2022 Census of Agriculture, the full five year count taken by USDA NASS, using the average value of farm real estate (land and buildings) per acre for each county. We use 3,072 of roughly 3,143 US counties; the rest are withheld by USDA to protect the privacy of counties with very few farms. Medians and bands are computed across those counties. The figure includes buildings and reflects whatever land sells for locally, so it tracks both farm productivity in rural counties and development pressure near cities, which is why urban edge counties read high. It is a county average, not a parcel appraisal.
Explore the live data in the Price Per Acre by County index, see state baselines and year on year movement in the Price Per Acre Index, or price a specific parcel with the Land Value Estimator.
