A Dated Field-to-Shelf Profile of the American Pumpkin for National Pumpkin Day
Credit: Daily Vitality
Every October, pumpkins seem to appear everywhere at once. They stack up by the grocery store doors, line the steps of your neighbors' houses, and fill the cans stocked near the pie shells. It's easy to assume they all come from the same kind of farm and end up in the same kind of place. The numbers tell a more interesting story.
The pumpkin you carve and the pumpkin in your pie often come from different states, different varieties, and markets that barely overlap. One sells at the farm for roughly a quarter per pound. The other sells for less than three cents. And the "pounds per person" figure that circulates every fall counts both kinds together, along with the ones that sit on a porch until November and never get eaten.
For National Pumpkin Day on October 26, we pulled the latest federal figures from three USDA agencies and put them side by side, from the field to the shelf to the plate: where pumpkins grew in 2025, what grocery stores advertised them for in September 2026, and how many pounds reach the average American. Every number is dated, and every estimate is labeled as one.
The 2025 crop is the newest one on record. According to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service's Vegetables 2025 Summary, US growers harvested 14.7 million hundredweight of pumpkins in 2025, or about 1.47 billion pounds, from 68,100 acres. That was up 4% from 2024, while the crop's value slipped 5% to $259 million. The 2026 harvest won't be tallied until the next summary in February 2027, so the pumpkins in stores right now aren't in any federal count yet.
NASS surveys 13 named states and rolls the rest into an "Other States" line. Here is how the 2025 crop broke down.
Source: USDA NASS, Vegetables 2025 Summary (February 2026). Production converted from hundredweight (1 cwt = 100 lb); shares calculated by Daily Vitality. Oregon and Texas figures are withheld by NASS to protect individual farms and are included in "Other states."
Illinois stands out in almost every column. It harvested nearly twice the acreage of any other state and averaged 360 hundredweight per acre, compared with a national average of about 215. The five leading states together produced 71.6% of the national crop, and Illinois alone produced a little more than the other four combined.
Now look at the value column. Illinois grew about 36% of the country's pumpkins by weight but earned roughly 10% of the crop's value. Indiana, with about a quarter of Illinois's tonnage, brought in the most money of any state at $31.6 million. Washington grew less than a tenth of what Illinois did and earned nearly as much.
The reason is what those pumpkins are for. Most Illinois pumpkins are grown to be cooked and canned, and processing pumpkins sell by the ton at a fraction of the price of a pumpkin headed for a front porch. We'll unpack that gap in the next section.
Pumpkin harvests swing more than you might expect from year to year, because yields depend heavily on weather during the growing season. The table below uses the most recent published figure for each year, since NASS revises earlier years as better data arrive.
Million pounds. Source: USDA NASS Vegetables Annual Summaries (2022 through 2025 editions). US totals before 2022 cover fewer states, because NASS added its "Other States" line that year.
A small but useful detail sits inside that table. When NASS first published 2024, it put Illinois at 485.1 million pounds. The 2025 Summary revised that down to 453.6 million, a drop of about 6%. Articles written last fall still quote the older number, which is why you may see slightly different Illinois figures depending on when a page was written.
NASS sorts every pumpkin sold into one of two buckets. Processing pumpkins go to a plant that cooks, purees, or cans them. Everything else is "fresh market," which NASS defines simply as utilized production that is not processed. That second bucket is broad. It holds the pie pumpkin you roast at home, the jack-o'-lantern you carve, and the decorative pumpkin that sits beside a hay bale until Thanksgiving. NASS doesn't separate eating pumpkins from decorative ones, and no federal survey does.
In 2025, fresh market accounted for 9.63 million hundredweight, about two-thirds of the utilized crop. Processors took 241,644 tons, which works out to roughly 4.83 million hundredweight, or the remaining third.
The processing side is remarkably concentrated. Illinois sold 230,969 tons of pumpkins to processors in 2025, which is 95.6% of the national processing total, and about 88% of its own utilized crop. That is why Illinois leads on volume and trails on value: it's growing a food ingredient, not a seasonal decoration.
Census data points the same way. According to the USDA Economic Research Service's pumpkin background page, about 85% of US pumpkin acreage in the 2022 Census of Agriculture was devoted to the fresh and ornamental market. In Illinois, nearly 70% of pumpkin acreage went to processing, compared with roughly 3% in Pennsylvania and under 1% in Indiana and California.
The farm counts tell a similar story. More than 15,000 US farms grew fresh-market pumpkins in 2022, with New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan each topping 1,000 farms and Ohio and Wisconsin close behind. Processing pumpkins came from just 959 farms nationwide. If you've picked a pumpkin from a patch down the road, you've met the fresh-market side of the industry. The canned side is a much smaller, more specialized world.
The price gap between the two markets is wide. In 2025, fresh-market pumpkins averaged $25.40 per hundredweight at the farm, or about 25 cents a pound. Processing pumpkins averaged $56.80 per ton, which is under 3 cents a pound. Illinois processing pumpkins came in lower still, at $47.70 per ton.
That difference explains the state price column in the first table. Washington's all-use average of $58.90 per hundredweight and Illinois's $4.84 aren't a sign that one state grows better pumpkins. They reflect what each state's pumpkins are sold for.
If you've wondered how much of the pumpkin-flavored food on store shelves involves pumpkin at all, our count of seasonal launches picks up that thread.
The Pumpkin Spice Takeover, Counted: New Products in the USDA Database by Year
For retail prices, the most detailed public source is the weekly National Retail Report from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. It tracks prices advertised by major grocery chains in circulars and digital promotions, and it's the only federal report that breaks pumpkins out by the size printed on the store's sign.
Two details shape how to read it. First, these are advertised sale prices, not the everyday shelf price at every store. Second, each figure is a weighted average of ads, so the "number of ads" beside each price shows how much evidence stands behind it.
The AMS report dated September 25, 2026, covering ads running from September 19 to October 1, showed the following national averages.
Source: USDA AMS, Weekly Grocery Store Specialty Crops Feature Activity, September 25, 2026. Prices are weighted averages of advertised prices.
A few patterns stand out. Extra Large and Large pumpkins land within about 10 cents of each other, so the "Extra Large" label doesn't carry much of a premium in these ads. Most pumpkin prices are within a few cents of where they sat a year ago, with the notable exception of pie pumpkins, which are up about 26% by the pound. And the cheapest per-pound figure, 39 cents, rests on only 46 ads from stores in the Southwest and Northwest, so it's a thin reading.
The same report splits prices by region. For pumpkins sold each without a size marking, the Midwest averaged $4.37 and the South Central region $4.55, while the Northeast came in at $5.07, the Southwest at $5.66, and the Southeast at $6.00. The Northwest topped the list at $6.99, though that figure comes from only 22 ads. It makes some sense that the Midwest, home to the biggest growing states, sits at the low end.
Pumpkins arrived in grocery ads all at once this year. The AMS reports for August 28 and September 4 listed no pumpkins at all, and the September 11 edition opened by noting that pumpkins "made a big entrance this week." Since then, prices have held remarkably steady.
Source: USDA AMS weekly retail reports. Each value is a national weighted average of advertised prices.
Last year's reports offer a sense of what comes next. Through October 2025, unmarked pumpkins sold each stayed between $5.06 and $5.31 in grocery ads. Pumpkins marked Large drifted up rather than down, from $5.47 in the October 3 report to $6.35 on October 24, and the few Large ads that ran in Halloween week averaged $7.49. The number of pumpkin ads also fell sharply that final week. In other words, the ad data from 2025 showed no pre-Halloween markdown.
For a wider view of how seasonal timing affects what you pay for produce, our month-by-month price tracker covers 15 fruits and vegetables.
In-Season vs. Off-Season Produce: 15 Fruits and Vegetables Priced Month by Month
Here is a question the grocery ads raise but don't answer. Is a pumpkin priced "each" a better deal than one priced by the pound?
AMS doesn't publish a standard weight for Large, Medium, or Small pumpkins, and stores don't use one either, so there is no documented way to convert a $6.07 "Large" into a price per pound. What we can calculate is the break-even weight: how heavy a pumpkin priced by the pound would have to be to cost the same as one priced each.
Daily Vitality calculation: September 25, 2026 AMS average price each, divided by the $0.39 per-pound average for unmarked pumpkins in the same report.
So a Large pumpkin at $6.07 works out cheaper than 39 cents a pound only if it weighs more than about 15.6 pounds. A pumpkin that would tip a bathroom scale past that mark comes out ahead when priced each; a lighter one comes out ahead by the pound.
Two cautions keep this in perspective. The 39-cent benchmark is based on few ads, and last October the per-pound price for unmarked pumpkins ran from 50 to 69 cents. At 50 cents a pound, the break-even weight for a $6.07 pumpkin drops to about 12 pounds. The comparison also only holds when the two pumpkins are otherwise alike, and a store's per-pound bin may hold different varieties than its priced-each display.
Putting the farm and retail numbers side by side shows how much a pumpkin's price changes depending on where it is and what form it takes.
Farm prices are what growers received on average; grocery prices are advertised prices. The last two rows are estimates.
A whole pumpkin comes with seeds, stringy pulp, a rind, and a stem. The USDA FoodData Central entry for raw pumpkin draws on the long-running Standard Reference database, which puts that inedible share, or refuse, at 30% of the pumpkin's weight. Canned pumpkin has no refuse at all, and its water content (about 90 grams per 100 grams) is close to that of raw pumpkin flesh (about 92 grams).
That adjustment matters for a fair comparison. A pie pumpkin advertised at $1.22 a pound works out to roughly $1.74 for each pound of flesh you'd actually cook with. This estimate doesn't account for any weight lost during roasting or steaming, so it's a starting point rather than a precise figure.
There's no current federal average price for canned pumpkin. The closest source is USDA's Purchase to Plate national average prices, built from grocery scanner data. Its most recent edition covers 2017 and 2018 and lists canned pumpkin at 42 cents per 100 grams. The next edition isn't expected before spring 2027.
To bring that older price forward, we adjusted it using the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for canned vegetables, which rose about 52% between its 2017 to 2018 average and August 2026. The result is about 64 cents per 100 grams, or roughly $2.89 a pound. For a standard 15-ounce can, that suggests about $2.71.
This is a historical relativity, not a shelf price. It tells you roughly where canned pumpkin sits compared with fresh, not what a specific store charges today. With that caveat, the pattern is clear: a pound of canned pumpkin costs more than a pound of fresh pie-pumpkin flesh, and many times more than the farm price of the processing pumpkins that fill those cans. The difference covers cooking, pureeing, canning, shipping, and the convenience of opening a can in November.
Pumpkin seeds follow their own price logic entirely. If you save them from a carving pumpkin, our comparison of seeds, almonds, and walnuts shows how they measure up.
Pumpkin Seeds vs. Almonds vs. Walnuts: Protein, Magnesium and Price Per Ounce
Every fall, you'll likely see a figure for how many pounds of pumpkin the average American "eats." The number comes from the USDA Economic Research Service, and the most recent version is in the ERS Vegetables and Pulses Yearbook, updated September 10, 2026. It puts per-capita pumpkin availability at 5.19 pounds in 2025, a preliminary figure measured at farm weight.
Source: USDA ERS, Vegetables and Pulses Yearbook, Table 34 (updated September 10, 2026). Pumpkins, all uses.
The long-term direction is upward. ERS notes that availability averaged about 6 pounds per person from 2022 to 2025, compared with about 4 pounds from 2001 to 2004. The sharp dip in 2015 followed poor growing weather in Illinois, and 2022 set the high point of the series at 6.42 pounds.
You may also come across a figure of 5.62 pounds for 2022. That comes from an older ERS food availability spreadsheet last updated in December 2023, which stops at 2022. The Yearbook replaces it, runs through 2025, and revises several earlier years upward.
It helps to know what goes into the number. ERS starts with production, and for pumpkins it scales up the NASS survey to cover the whole country, which lifts 2025 production to about 1.87 billion pounds, roughly 28% above NASS's surveyed total. It then adds imports (about 114 million pounds in 2025, up from 18 million in 2002) and subtracts exports (about 26 million). It subtracts another 10% of production to account for feed use, shrink, and loss. What's left, about 1.77 billion pounds, is divided by the US population.
That makes it a supply measure. It tracks how much pumpkin moved into the domestic market, not how much anyone swallowed. And the production figure at the very top, in ERS's own words, "includes fresh, ornamental, and processing uses."
Here is where the figure gets a bit slippery. The 5.19 pounds per person counts every pumpkin that entered the market, including the one carved into a grin and the ones stacked by the mailbox. No federal dataset separates decorative pumpkins from eating pumpkins.
We can still sketch a rough outline. Applying the 2025 NASS split between fresh market and processing to the ERS total suggests that about 1.7 pounds per person went to processors, the pumpkin that becomes canned puree and pie filling. The other 3.5 pounds or so went to the fresh market, where decorations and jack-o'-lanterns share space with the pie pumpkins people cook. Take out 30% for seeds, rind, and stem, and that fresh share carries at most about 2.4 pounds of flesh, some of which ends up on a compost pile rather than a plate.
This split is an approximation. ERS scales production beyond the states NASS surveys, and the loss deduction is a flat estimate. Still, it shows why "Americans eat 5 pounds of pumpkin a year" overstates the case. A more accurate reading is that about 5 pounds of pumpkin per person moves through the market, and a meaningful share of it is décor.
If you want an estimate at retail weight, ERS's older food availability system converts fresh pumpkin from farm weight to retail weight with a factor of 0.90. Applied to 2025, that gives about 4.7 pounds per person, a figure ERS itself hasn't published.
These per-capita figures are national averages of supply, not measurements of what individual people eat. A household that carves three pumpkins and never cooks one still counts toward the average.
Each dataset in this profile answers a slightly different question, and knowing which is which makes the numbers easier to use.
NASS production and prices describe the 2025 harvest in surveyed states, measured at the farm. AMS retail prices describe grocery advertisements in a specific week, and the AMS My Market News archive holds every past edition if you'd like to follow the season as it unfolds. ERS availability describes the national supply per person across a whole year. The canned pumpkin price is an inflation-adjusted estimate from older scanner data.
Put together, they show a clear shape. Pumpkin production is spread across thousands of farms but concentrated in a handful of states, with Illinois supplying almost all of the pumpkin that ends up canned. Grocery prices for fresh pumpkins held steady through September, landing within a few cents of last year for most sizes. And the familiar pounds-per-person figure is really a measure of how many pumpkins we buy, whether they end up in a pie or on the porch.
For more on how grocery prices vary across stores and what that means for your cart, our comparison of nutrition per dollar at major chains is a helpful next read.
About the Author
Angela Nightingale is a Senior Editor at Daily Vitality with over two decades of experience in digital publishing and health and wellness content. She specializes in turning complex, often-confusing health topics into clear, calm, and practical guidance that respects the reader's intelligence. Her work focuses on helping people feel informed and confident — never overwhelmed or alarmed — as they make everyday decisions about how they eat, move, rest, and age.
Illinois, by a wide margin. It produced about 533 million pounds in 2025, roughly 36% of the US crop, followed by California, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Most Illinois pumpkins are grown for processing into canned pumpkin, and processing pumpkins sold for under 3 cents a pound at the farm in 2025, compared with about 25 cents for fresh-market pumpkins.
Not yet. The latest federal production data covers the 2025 crop. USDA publishes the 2026 figures in its Vegetables Annual Summary, expected in February 2027.
In grocery ads for the week ending October 1, 2026, pumpkins marked Large averaged $6.07 each nationally, based on 1,248 ads. Regional averages for unmarked pumpkins ranged from $4.37 in the Midwest to $6.99 in the Northwest.
They are advertised prices from grocery circulars and digital promotions, averaged across ads. Everyday shelf prices, farm stands, and pumpkin patches can differ.
They didn't in 2025. Ads for pumpkins marked Large rose from $5.47 in early October to $6.35 on October 24, and the few Large ads that ran in Halloween week averaged $7.49.
USDA doesn't measure how much pumpkin people eat. Its per-capita availability figure, 5.19 pounds in 2025, counts all pumpkins entering the market, including decorative and carving pumpkins.
USDA's reference data puts the inedible portion of a raw pumpkin, meaning seeds, rind, and stem, at 30% of its weight, leaving about 70% as flesh.
By the pound of flesh, it appears to be. Our estimate puts canned pumpkin at about $2.89 per pound, compared with about $1.74 per edible pound for a pie pumpkin at September 2026 ad prices. The canned figure is an inflation-adjusted estimate, not a current shelf price.
ERS estimates the US imported about 114 million pounds of pumpkins in 2025, a small share of total supply but about six times the 2002 level. The Yearbook table reports volumes rather than countries of origin.
