Cash Rent by State, 2026

Rent is fixed in the spring. Yield and price are not. That is the whole problem with judging a lease by the rent alone: the rent stops moving the day you sign, and everything that pays for it keeps moving for another nine months.

Expressing rent as a share of gross revenue puts the fixed number on top of the moving one. When corn is $6.00 and the county trends 200 bushels, $250 rent is about 21% of the gross. When corn is $4.00, the same $250 on the same ground is over 31%. Nothing about the lease changed. The arithmetic underneath it did.

There is no magic percentage. Anyone quoting you one number for the whole country is guessing, or selling. What the rest of the gross has to cover (seed, fertilizer, chemical, iron, labor, interest, living) is wildly different between two operations on the same road. The useful comparison is your county against its own history, which is why the calculator’s chart goes back to 2008.

The rent is USDA NASS’s county estimate from the Cash Rents Survey, a survey of roughly 280,000 farms and ranches run every year in every state but Alaska. The 2008 Farm Bill requires NASS to publish a mean rate for every county with at least 20,000 acres of cropland plus pasture. Results land each August and are not revised afterward. The Farm Service Agency uses these same county estimates to set market-based rates for programs like CRP.

The trend yield is ours, not USDA’s: an ordinary least-squares fit through the county’s NASS yield estimates over the last fifteen years, projected to the current year. It is fitted on the same practice as the rent it is divided by: dryland (non-irrigated) yields for dryland rent, irrigated yields for irrigated rent. The all-practice county yield is used only where NASS reports no irrigation in the county; anywhere else it is mostly pivot corn and would make dryland rent look cheap, so the trend is withheld and the page says why. Where a county has fewer than six real years of yield on record, or its series stopped more than three years ago, no trend is shown at all.

It will not fill in your county if NASS didn’t. Counties with too few survey responses are withheld. Where that happens you get a blank and a note that NASS did not publish, never a neighbor’s number.

It has no 2015 or 2018. NASS ran no county Cash Rents Survey in those years, so the series runs 2008 to 2014, 2016 to 2017 and 2019 forward. Those years are left blank.

It is a county mean, not a rate card. Rents differ between farms on the same road: soil, drainage, field size, yield history, and how badly the neighbor wants it.

The common landlord conversation is a number against a feeling. The calculator gives both sides the same arithmetic to argue about, which is usually a shorter argument. Put your real yield in: if your ground beats the county by fifteen bushels, type that in. Put your real basis in: over a 200-bushel acre, thirty cents is sixty dollars. Look at the history, not the level: a ratio means little alone and a lot next to the same county’s last fifteen years.

What it will not do is tell you what to sign. That is between you, your landlord, and your own numbers. Settled on a number? Put it on paper with the free AGSIST cash farm lease.

USDA NASS publishes a mean cash rental rate for every county with at least 20,000 acres of cropland plus pasture, separately for non-irrigated cropland, irrigated cropland, and permanent pasture. Pick your state above to see every published county rate and its history. If your county is not listed, NASS did not get enough survey responses to publish a rate for it.

USDA NASS publishes a separate cash rent for permanent pasture in each county where enough pasture leases come back in the survey. In 2026 the state medians of those county rates ran from $3 an acre in New Mexico to $65.25 in Iowa, across 40 states. The Pasture column above has each state's median; open a state for every county's pasture rate and its history.

USDA NASS releases county cash rent estimates each August, from a survey of roughly 280,000 farms and ranches conducted earlier the same year. The rate published in a given August describes that same crop year. Rates are not revised after publication.

NASS did not conduct the county Cash Rents Survey in 2015 or 2018, so no county estimates exist for those years. County data runs 2008 to 2014, 2016 to 2017, and 2019 forward. These pages leave those years blank.

There is no single correct figure. Rent as a share of gross revenue is useful because it moves when yields and prices move, while the rent itself is fixed for the season. Comparing the ratio to your own county's history is more informative than comparing it to a national rule of thumb. What the remaining share has to cover (seed, fertilizer, chemical, machinery, labor, interest) varies enormously between operations.

The rent share calculator on each Farmland Atlas county page charts it for every county with the data. For each year it divides that year's published county rent by that year's actual county yield for the same practice times that year's state average price received: dryland rent over the dryland yield, irrigated rent over the irrigated yield. Where the only county yield mixes irrigated and dryland acres, that year is withheld and marked. Every term is a USDA figure published after the fact, so the line shows what happened, not a projection. The pattern in most Corn Belt counties is that rent takes a far larger share of the gross in low-price years than in high-price years, even when the rent itself barely moves.

The historical chart uses the USDA NASS marketing-year average price received by farmers in your state, which reflects actual sales and therefore already includes local basis. The calculator uses a board price plus a basis you enter yourself, because it is looking forward at a crop you have not sold. The two answer different questions: what happened, and what might.

No. It is a county mean from a voluntary survey. Rents vary widely within a county and even between farms on the same road, driven by soil type, drainage, field size, yield history, and how badly a neighbor wants the ground. Treat the county mean as a reference point for a conversation, not as a rate card.