State-legal cannabis businesses continue to struggle with accessing capital, according to a new report from the U. S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO publicly released a report on Sept. 8 at the request of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs that found what operators have known for years about access to capital.
The report, published August 7, 2026, but not released until a month later, examined how federal banking regulators oversee cannabis banking and the obstacles that licensed operators still face more than a decade after states began legalizing marijuana.
GAO found that just 21,760 cannabis-related businesses (CRBs) held active state licenses as of the end of 2025, down from a peak of 27,852 in 2022, with nearly 80% concentrated in eight states, led by California at roughly 22%. GAO utilized data from CRB Monitor to assess the scope of licensing across legal states.
The total number of active licenses in the nation has slightly decreased since the first quarter of 2026, but there is still a large amount of activity, along with growth in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey among other states.
All of those businesses need access to financial services, which remain more expensive than other industries. Some state-licensed cannabis businesses are paying more than $100,000 annually in fees just to maintain a basic business bank account, according to the GAO’s report.
Despite the shrinking count of licensed operators, a separate industry estimate cited in the report pegs cannabis-supported employment at about 425,000 jobs in 2024.
On the banking side, the numbers remain thin. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) data shows that only about 1,000 banks and credit unions, which amounts to roughly 11% of the nation’s 9,000 insured depository institutions, filed suspicious activity reports indicating they served cannabis businesses in 2024.
That share has held steady since 2019 after rising in the years following FinCEN’s 2014 guidance, which first laid out how banks could serve the industry while complying with the Bank Secrecy Act.
For the businesses that do find a banking partner, the terms are often punishing. GAO’s focus groups found that operators frequently pay steep account fees, wait weeks or months for accounts to become operational, and face loan interest rates exceeding 15%, while comparably sized non-cannabis businesses pay a median 7.4% to 7.9%, according to the report, which used data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Compounding the problem, Visa and Mastercard continue to prohibit their cards from being used for cannabis purchases, pushing many businesses toward cash-heavy operations and workarounds like “cashless ATMs” that risk violating card-network rules.
Over the last couple of years, both credit card giants have cracked down on operators that processed card transactions using the “cashless ATM” method, culminating in federal lawsuits.
The report suggests these frictions are less about lack of guidance than about risk tolerance. Federal banking regulators told GAO they neither encourage nor discourage institutions from serving CRBs, and GAO found no evidence that any institution has faced enforcement action solely for banking a cannabis business.
Looking ahead, the report offers a mixed forecast. A proposed federal “safe harbor” law, which would shield banks from liability for serving state-licensed CRBs, drew divided reactions in GAO’s focus groups, according to the report.
Despite the support, SAFE Banking or SAFER Banking remains a perennial cause that has repeatedly failed to pass the House and Senate.
While institutions currently on the sidelines were more likely to say such a law would change their calculus, banks already serving the industry were skeptical it would meaningfully expand their offerings.
A more salient shift in the event of reform related to how the federal government views cannabis and the financial sector could be a change in stance from Visa or Mastercard, enabling easier transactions at the retail level.
