Hay Prices by State — July 2026

† Upper Midwest figures are UW-Madison Extension's compiled quality-tested sales, not a USDA AMS report. No AMS hay report exists for NY — the New Holland, PA auction is the nearest reported market. Ranges compress many lots — open the report for bale sizes, regions, and full quality breakdowns.

What a reported hay price actually represents

USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reporters build these numbers by calling buyers, sellers, brokers and auction barns and writing down what actually changed hands during a reporting window. That makes the figures a record of observed trade — not a survey, not a posted asking price, and not an official state average. Thin weeks happen. When only a handful of loads move, a published range can rest on a few transactions and will jump around for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying market. The report text generally says so, which is why every row here links to the document rather than stopping at the summary.

Equally important is what the price leaves out. Most reported hay is quoted FOB, meaning it sits in the barn or the stack, gets loaded onto your trailer, and freight is your problem. A row marked delivered already has the haul folded in, and the two cannot be compared until you add trucking back to the FOB figure. Beyond freight, a quoted price rarely covers loading, replacing twine or net wrap, tarps, storage, shrink from weathering, or the fuel and hours you burn fetching it. Hay that looks cheap two counties over frequently is not, once the pickup makes the round trip twice.

Why $/ton and $/bale are not interchangeable

They describe the same forage in units that only reconcile if you know the bale weight, and hardly anyone does. The converter above runs it both directions: dollars per bale equals dollars per ton times bale pounds divided by 2,000, and the reverse multiplies a bale price by 2,000 and divides by the weight.

The difficulty is that bale weight is an outcome, not a specification. A 4×5 round can plausibly land anywhere from roughly 600 to 900 pounds depending on the baler's density setting, moisture at baling, species and stem coarseness, and how long it sat outside shedding a weathered rind. That is a fifty percent spread, and every bit of it lands on the per-ton price. Package type shifts the comparison again: small squares carry genuine handling labor that shows up as a premium once you standardize. Kentucky's $6.75 small squares are $270/ton hay if they weigh 50 lb — ordinary grass forage that only reads cheap because the package is small.

Reading a market report as a range, not a number

Every figure in the table compresses a report that is itself a compression. One line such as "Premium alfalfa, large rounds" can summarize a dozen lots from several counties sold across a week, and the low and high ends are often two genuinely different products rather than a negotiating spread. Treat the range as a description of the market's shape, then work out where your hay sits inside it.

Read four things before you read the price. First the class and package, because rounds, large squares and small squares trade as separate markets. Second the quality descriptor. Third the volume or number of loads behind the quote, since a thinly traded week deserves less confidence than a busy one. Fourth the commentary paragraph, where the reporter mentions drought, irrigation, export demand, freight availability, or a first cutting that got rained on. That context is the part no numeric table can carry, and it is usually the part that explains the number.

What the quality grades are measuring

Supreme, Premium, Good, Fair and Utility are not adjectives a seller invented. They map to laboratory forage analysis — crude protein, fiber fractions, digestibility, and the relative feed indexes built from those. The Upper Midwest rows use a Prime-through-numbered-grade scheme expressing the same idea. A dairy needs the top of the ladder because milk output is limited by energy and protein density; a dry beef cow in midwinter does fine on hay a dairy would reject. Paying dairy money for cow hay is the single most common way to overspend.

Several things the grade never captures still move what a buyer should pay: cutting number, leaf retention (leaves hold the protein, stems hold the filler), rain damage after cutting, weed and stubble content, dust, mold, and storage history. Horse buyers pay specifically for the absence of dust and mold, which is why stable hay in the table trades so far above the same species headed to a cattleman. When real money is involved, pull a core sample and have it tested instead of arguing about color.

Regional and seasonal spread

Hay is bulky and cheap per pound, so freight enforces a short economic radius and regional markets stay far apart without arbitrage closing the gap. That is why the spread across these states is so wide, and why a single national hay price would be close to meaningless. Irrigated western alfalfa, prairie and meadow grass, southern bermuda sold by the round bale, and northeastern auction hay bought largely by horse owners are four different businesses sharing one word.

Timing matters as well, and it runs opposite to intuition: hay in the barn keeps costing you something every month it sits, and the buyer without storage discovers in late winter what that carrying cost was worth. A quote taken at the height of harvest is not a forecast of what the same forage costs after a hard winter, or after drought somewhere upwind starts pulling loads out of your region. Nothing here predicts that. These rows report what was observed on the dates shown, and the dates are printed for exactly that reason.

What this tool cannot tell you

It cannot value your specific lot, because it has never seen your hay or the test that would grade it. It cannot quote you delivered, because it does not know the mileage or what diesel is doing this month. It cannot tell you where the market moved between our quarterly refreshes — the linked reports open the newest edition, and between updates those PDFs are the current word, not this summary.

What it does reliably is catch the arithmetic errors that cost real money: a bale price that seemed reasonable and was not, a small-square quote weighed against a round-bale market, a delivered figure stacked against an FOB one. Convert first, weigh the bales second, and then use the hay needs calculator to work out how many tons your herd actually eats before deciding how many to haul home.

Table refreshed quarterly (next: October 2026). Report links always open the newest edition — between our refreshes, the linked PDFs are the current word.