The state of licensed cannabis retail in NYC

According to BudAbout's analysis of state license records, New York City added 64 licensed dispensaries in 2026 H1, against 65 in 2025 H1 — a change of -2%. The land-rush phase is over, but the market is not shutting down: openings have settled into a steady rate rather than falling off a cliff.

A correction worth stating plainly. An earlier version of this page reported a 73% collapse in opening velocity, from a dataset pulled on July 13, 2026 that showed only 17 openings for the same period now showing 64. New York backfills each shop's public opening date for weeks after the fact, so the most recent months are always undercounted and always look like a cliff. The figures on this page are now computed from the state dataset each time it is regenerated, and the period still filling in is excluded from the comparison rather than reported as final.

Manhattan's 82 licensed storefronts work out to 5.1 shops per 100,000 residents. Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island cluster at 2.6. The Bronx — 1.4 million residents — has 19 licensed shops: 1.3 per 100,000, the lowest access in the city by a wide margin and less than half of any other borough. For a legalization program with equity at its center, where the stores physically are remains its most visible unfinished business.

Of the 242 active retail licenses in the state's dataset, 156 — 64% — are Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses, the program reserved for justice-involved applicants and qualifying nonprofits. Whatever else is said about New York's rollout, the storefront layer of the country's most scrutinized legal market is, by count, majority equity-licensed.

BudAbout cross-checks the license dataset against the State's consumer verification list and each shop's own storefront presence, weekly. As of July 13: one verifiably open, state-verified dispensary is entirely absent from the current-licenses dataset, and three of the five newest shops appear in state records only under legal-entity names that don't match the sign on the door — filings like “GRAPE STOMPER LLC” and “M & M Neighborhood Convenience Inc.” trade as Good Company and The Unit. Anyone relying on the raw open-data feed alone — researchers, journalists, app builders — is undercounting the market and mislabeling its newest storefronts.