In January 2022, the US cannabis industry will employ 428,059 people

Leafly, in partnership with Whitney Economics, has released its sixth annual cannabis jobs report.

The Leafly Jobs Report 2022, which looked at the 11 states where cannabis for adult use is legal in the US and the 27 states where medical cannabis is permitted, reveals that jobs in the cannabis sector grew by 33 % in 2021.

According to Leafly, 2021 is the fifth consecutive year that the sector has grown at an annual rate of over 27 %. In addition, the analysis revealed that the cannabis industry currently employs 428,059 Americans and generated nearly 25 billion $ in sales last year, roughly a quarter of the country's total projected cannabis market.

The report also forecasts that the U.S. cannabis industry will eventually employ between 1.5 and 1.75 million people, nearly four times as many as today, and that the sector will will generate around 45 billion $ in annual sales by 2025.

The 428,059 full-time jobs cover a wide variety of cannabis-related roles, from «plant-touching» jobs like cultivation and retail, to ancillary jobs like accounting, legal, security or construction. By 2021, employment in the cannabis industry was estimated at 321,000 jobs, compared with 122,800 in 2017, the first year in which Leafly published its report.

«In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. cannabis industry sold nearly 25 billion $ of products and created over 107,000 new jobs - enough to fill the Rose Bowl and more,» says the report in its introduction.

«This represents a 33 % increase in jobs in a single year. And it's the fifth consecutive year of annual job growth above 27 %. No other industry in America can match that. Last year, the U.S. legal cannabis industry created more than 280 new jobs every day. By 2021, someone was hired for a cannabis-supported job every two minutes or so of the workday.»

The report also provides other means of comparison to put things in perspective, including the fact that there are three times as many cannabis workers as dentists in the U.S., and that there are more people working in cannabis than there are hairdressers, barbers and beauticians combined.

The report also presents the top ten cannabis markets in terms of employment, namely California, the United States and Canada. Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania (medical use only), Florida (medical use only), Arizona, Washington and Oregon.

However, the report also recommends that people who wish to find a job in the cannabis industry, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York are full of possibilities, as potential new markets or mature markets with a competing illegal market.

The authors of the report estimate that these figures will only increase in the years to come.

«In the eight years since the country's first adult-use cannabis stores opened, the industry has created hundreds of thousands of new American jobs. And there are many more to come. Whitney Economics calculates that the total figure for cannabis sales in 2021 - just under $25 billion - represents only about 25 % of the total potential U.S. cannabis market,» the report says. It goes on to say that 75 % of cannabis industry demand is met by illegal cultivation and sales, and that by 2025, the cannabis industry could be worth as much as $45 billion.