For most of the last decade every tequila dataset told the same story, which was up. That has stopped. The numbers now point in different directions depending on whether you are counting cases, dollars, or price bands, and the disagreement is the most useful thing about them.
The Distilled Spirits Council reported US supplier revenue for tequila and mezcal of $6.4 billion in 2025, down 4.1 percent, on volumes that fell only 0.3 percent to 32.1 million nine litre cases. Read those two figures together and the shape of the problem appears: Americans are still buying roughly as many bottles, and paying less for them.
Volume flat, value down, one tier growing
IWSR data released in July 2026 puts ultra-premium tequila up 7 percent, on a compound annual growth rate of about 31 percent since 2019, with its share of the US category rising from 6 percent to 17 percent. Super-premium fell 6 percent over the same period and premium moved 1 percent. The category is not shrinking so much as hollowing: the top is compounding, the middle is under pressure.
SipSource's price-band detail complicates the picture rather than confirming it. It shows the $100 and above tequila tier down 16.5 percent by volume, with $20 to $29.99 the only band in growth. That is not a contradiction of IWSR so much as a different question. IWSR is measuring a long-run premiumisation trend; SipSource is measuring what moved through distributors in a specific recent window, during which the most expensive bottles slowed sharply.
The agave number underneath all of it
None of this is legible without the raw material. Blue agave that traded above 30 pesos per kilo at the peak has collapsed. The Consejo Regulador del Tequila has described prices in the region of 0.80 to eight pesos per kilo in early 2026, against a planted base of roughly 511,000 hectares and about 1.7 billion plants. Growers are abandoning fields because the crop no longer covers the cost of harvesting it.
Cheap agave means input cost has stopped being the constraint on anyone's margin. When a brand's economics are still poor in that environment, the problem is not what the liquid costs to make. It is what a drinker believes the bottle is worth, which is a marketing and trust problem rather than a supply one.
How to read a tequila statistic
Three questions settle most confusion. Is this counting cases or dollars, because they now move in opposite directions. Is it measuring depletions from distributors or sales to consumers, because the gap between them widened while wholesalers worked down inventory. And what window is it, because a 52 week figure and a four week figure currently tell different stories about the same shelf.
What we are watching
Whether the ultra-premium tier holds its growth once the comparison base includes the slowdown. Whether the $100 and above decline is a restocking artefact or a genuine ceiling. Whether agave prices recover enough to pull abandoned hectares back into production, which would set up the next shortage. And whether any producer passes the lower input cost through to shelf price, which so far almost none have.