Australia imported a record 81.1 tonnes of cannabis flower in 2025 and grew another 55.3 tonnes at home — the strongest year on record for both. In the same year, supply to patients fell for the first time since reporting began: units supplied dropped 28.6% in the second half, from 3.72 million to 2.65 million. Australia enters 2026 with record supply, record product breadth, roughly a year of flower sitting in inventory and a demand curve that has just bent downward — and with a regulator that has moved from watching the market to acting on it.
Table of Contents
For four years the Australian story was a single line moving up and to the right. Flower imports climbed from 7.2 tonnes in 2021 to 81.1 tonnes in 2025, an eleven-fold expansion. Domestic cultivation followed. Product ranges multiplied. Supply to patients grew for eight consecutive half-year periods, from half a million units in the second half of 2021 to 3.72 million in the second half of 2024.
The ninth period broke the pattern. Data released by the Therapeutic Goods Administration under Freedom of Information (FOI 26-3221), covering sponsor-reported supply from H2 2021 to H2 2025, shows units supplied falling 28.6% in the second half of 2025. Physical volume moved with it: dried flower fell from roughly 33 tonnes in H1 to 23.6 tonnes in H2.
What follows sets the trade and production data from the Office of Drug Control alongside the TGA supply series, and then looks underneath the headline decline at what patients actually received — because the composition of the contraction turns out to be more informative than its size.
Note on terms: the TGA series counts units supplied by sponsors under the Special Access Scheme and Authorised Prescriber pathways. It is not a count of patients, prescriptions or pharmacy sales.
Supply expanded on every front — and the map was redrawn
Flower imports reached 81.1 tonnes in 2025, up 4.8% on 2024. That headline number understates what happened, because the composition changed far more than the total did.
Canada gave it up. Canadian volumes fell from 62.1 to 49.1 tonnes, and Canada’s share dropped from a historic ~80% to 61%. Canadian producers have been contending with domestic oversupply and price compression at home; Australia, already long on inventory, was not the market in which to defend price. Canadian operators have been focusing more on the growing Canadian market with higher prices.
Thailand arrived. Thai flower went from 1.1 tonnes in 2024 to 20.7 tonnes in 2025, taking 25% of the import market from a standing start. To put that in proportion: Thailand alone added roughly five times the market’s entire net growth for the year. It did not ride an expansion — it took share.
South Africa stepped back on flower, from 5.0 to 3.9 tonnes, despite a better presence in extract categories such as oils and vapes. New Zealand appeared as a meaningful origin at 2.2 tonnes, and Colombia at 2.0 tonnes.
The reason Australia is exposed to a low-cost entrant in a way that Germany is not comes down to certification. Australia accepts CUMCS-certified material, not only EU-GMP, which makes the pool of eligible suppliers structurally wider. Certification sets the price floor — and Australia’s floor sits lower than most other major import markets.
Meanwhile domestic cultivation had its best year yet: 55.3 tonnes of flower, up 30%. Inventories closed the year at 50.8 tonnes — 29.4 tonnes of domestic and 21.4 tonnes of imported stock — against a market running at roughly 47 tonnes a year on the second-half rate. That is close to twelve months of national demand held in storage before a single new gram is harvested or landed.
Exports were the year’s clearest positive signal. Australian flower exports more than doubled to 6.8 tonnes, up from 3.3, with growing international exposure for producers including BLS Pharmaceuticals, Australian Natural Therapeutics Group (ANTG) and ECS Botanics.
But the export book is one market deep. Germany took 3.7 tonnes directly — over half the total — and Czechia a further 1.5 tonnes, most of it processing capacity ultimately serving German demand. Together that is roughly three-quarters of everything Australia exported, aimed at a single end market. New Zealand, the largest destination in 2024 at 1.6 tonnes, fell to 0.9; the United Kingdom grew to 0.7 tonnes, real growth from a small base.
The conclusion for this section is arithmetic. Australia added 136.4 tonnes of new flower supply in 2025 — 55.3 grown, 81.1 imported — against roughly 57 tonnes supplied to patients and 6.8 tonnes exported. Just over half of new supply found an end use.
Origin of flower imports (2021-2025)
Destination of flower exports (2021-2025)
Demand fell across every format but one
The contraction was general, not just concentrated on specific segments. Between H1 and H2 2025:
- Flower fell 33% in units, from 2.85 to 1.91 million packs — 29% in tonnage, from roughly 33 to 23.6 tonnes.
- Oral liquids fell 21%, from 0.42 to 0.33 million units.
- Vapes fell 20%, from 0.25 to 0.20 million.
- Pastilles grew 9%, from 0.19 to 0.21 million packs — the only format to expand.
However, not all segments felt the same impact. Flower potency moved up: parsing THC from sponsor-reported product names and cannabinoid profiles across all 7,405 product lines shows products in the 20–25% THC range were 52% of flower units in 2021 and are 27% now; the 25–30% band went from 17% to 52%. Weighted average potency rose from 21.5% to 24.1%. Products at 30% THC or above went from two to seventy-one.
The mix shifted too. Flower is past its peak share: 78.6% of units at the H2 2024 high, 72.0% now. Vapes and pastilles together took roughly 16% of units, up from 9% a year earlier and 6% two years before that.
Most tellingly, the contraction hit the bottom of the market hardest. Low-potency flower lost roughly two thirds of its volume between H1 and H2 2025. The highest-potency band lost just around 14%. Under pressure, the Australian market traded up, not down — which is the opposite of what a straightforward affordability story would predict, and the opposite of what a crackdown aimed at high-THC prescribing would produce
Units supplied by format (2021-2025)
Oral liquids have become a CBD product: CBD-only formulations rose from 29% of units in 2024 to 39% in 2025, while THC-dominant oils fell from 9.0% to 4.9%.
Vapes went the other way and are now unambiguously a THC format — 93% of units are THC-only or THC-dominant, at an average of 78% THC.
Pastilles, the one format still growing, are not the gentle entry product the category name suggests. 81% of pastille packs now carry 10mg or more of THC per piece, and 37% carry 20mg or more — up from under 5% at that dose a year earlier. On a piece basis the format went from 3.7 million individual pastilles in H2 2024 to 9.3 million in H2 2025.
The conclusion for this section: the decline is not a story about one product failing. Every major format lost volume, and every one of them simultaneously became more concentrated — stronger oils, higher-dose pastilles, larger flower packs. Australians bought less, and bought more intensely.
Underneath the decline, the market is still expanding
The most counterintuitive finding is that product breadth did not contract with demand. Flower product lines rose from 809 to 854 in the half the market fell — against 97 in H2 2021, a near nine-fold expansion. Vapes reached 172 lines and pastilles 171, both still launching. Only oral liquids gave ground, easing from 292 to 258.
Concentration tells the same story from the other side. The top ten flower products held 64.7% of flower volume in H2 2021; today they hold 24.8%. No product line in flower or oils holds even 9% of its own format. Australia now has nearly nine times more flower products than four years ago, competing for a market that has just shrunk by a quarter — a configuration that resolves through wholesale price pressure rather than through growth.
Regulatory posture has been a key factor impacting market dynamics. On 9 July 2025 AHPRA and the National Boards issued prescribing guidance and confirmed action against 57 practitioners, with 60 more under investigation; the underlying data flagged eight prescribers who had issued more than 10,000 scripts in a six-month window, and one who had issued over 17,000. In August 2025 the TGA opened a consultation on the oversight of unapproved medicinal cannabis products. On 20 February 2026, responding to 790 submissions, it concluded that the current access framework is “not fit-for-purpose”, and signalled quality standards covering domestic and imported product, standardised labelling, plain packaging and potential restrictions on high-THC access.
The conclusion for this section: the first phase of regulatory attention was aimed at who prescribes. The direction the TGA has signalled for the next phase is aimed at what sits on the shelf — quality, labelling, imports and potency. Those are different exposures, and they fall on different companies.
No. of SKUs by format (2021-2025)
What Australian operators face in 2026
The year ended with six conditions holding at once: falling demand, record product breadth, record domestic production, aggressive low-cost imports, roughly twelve months of inventory cover, and mounting wholesale price pressure. Each of them individually is manageable. Together they describe a market that will clear through price and consolidation rather than through volume growth.
Three things will decide how 2026 reads. Whether demand continues to soften or recovers, which would make this a structural reset rather than an enforcement shock. Whether import standards tighten, which would reprice import supply. And whether exports, the one genuine release valve, scale beyond a single destination.
Source: Therapeutic Goods Administration, FOI 26-3221 (sponsor-reported supply, H2 2021 – H2 2025) and the Office of Drug Control (imports, exports, production and stock, CY2021–CY2025), consolidated by Cannamonitor. Supply figures are units supplied by sponsors under SAS and AP pathways — not patients, prescriptions or pharmacy sell-through. Potency figures are parsed from sponsor-reported label claims, not independent assays.
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The Australia Market Datapack.
Eight pages: trade and production, landed cost, demand by format, and a page each on flower, oils, vapes and pastilles — with the physical volume series that isn’t public anywhere. Free, for a work email.