Cannacurio #115: Store Licensing Recap Q2 2025

Stores, or doors, are a key retail metric for the industry. Cannabiz Media accounts for medical licenses as Dispensaries and adult licenses as Retailers. More stores were added in Q2 versus Q1 but the hemp market continues to make it challenging for licensed cannabis stores to thrive.

Dispensary/Retail Key Points

• 28 sates added stores in Q2.
• 361 new store licenses were issued in Q2 down from 381 (-5%) in Q1.
• There are 13,198 active licenses flat from 13,184 at the end of Q1.
• 132 Oklahoma stores went offline since January 1.

Trends

The industry competes with substitutes like hemp and the legacy market. In Q2, Hemp regulation continued to dominate the news:

• Texas lawmakers fast-tracked Senate Bill 5 in a special session to ban consumable hemp products with any detectable THC, criminalizing possession as a misdemeanor.
• U.S. Senate stripped language from the FY 2026 Agriculture bill that would have banned all intoxicating hemp products, preserving the ability of convenience stores and smoke shops to sell delta-8 edibles and other hemp-derived THC items.
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) successfully blocked Sen. Mitch McConnell’s push to close the 2018 Farm Bill loophole in the Senate spending bill, preventing a federal prohibition on any hemp-derived products containing “quantifiable” THC and maintaining legal status for most CBD and hemp-derived goods.
• New York’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) mistakenly approved 152 dispensary licenses—105 issued and 47 pending—for locations too close to schools, violating the state’s 500-foot buffer rule.

Despite all this hemp and cannabis drama, licenses are still being issued. In the Q2 New Store Leaderboard, New York has held onto their leadership position since Q4 2024; and accounted for almost one quarter of all new store licenses nationwide.

In looking back over the last 12 months, the average number of new store licenses has been about 140. The outlier months can be attributed to one or two states dropping a large number of new licenses.  

Finally, here is the overall top 10 leaderboard for stores:

Conclusion

Despite the challenges from the illicit market, hemp and regulatory challenges, the number of stores continue to increase. All eyes are on Minnesota, Kentucky and Delaware for the rest of 2026. We are also monitoring what is happening on the tribal front as that activity has increased and can be tracked in Cannabiz Media.

Author

Ed Keating is a co-founder of Cannabiz Media and oversees the company’s data research and government relations efforts. He has spent his career working with and advising information companies in the compliance space. Ed has managed product, marketing, and sales while overseeing complex multijurisdictional product lines in the securities, corporate, UCC, safety, environmental, and human resource markets.  

At Cannabiz Media, Ed enjoys the challenge of working with regulators across the globe as he and his team gather corporate, financial, and license information to track the people, products, and businesses in the cannabis economy.  

Ed graduated from Hamilton College and received his MBA from theKellogg School at Northwestern University.

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