For most Arizona parcels under a few hundred acres, a lease pays almost nothing. The USDA's 2025 survey put the average rent for Arizona pastureland at $1.90 an acre per year, the lowest of any state, against $15.50 for the country. A 40-acre parcel rents for about $76 a year at that rate. Crop ground with water is the exception: Arizona cropland averaged $334 an acre.
So the question is rarely "lease or sell" for a small parcel. It is "sell, or keep paying taxes on land that earns nothing." This page puts the rent next to what the same acreage sold for, so you can see the gap.
What grazing land rents for in Arizona
Grazing rent is not priced per acre in the way a house lot is. It is priced per animal unit month, or AUM: one cow, one horse, five goats or five sheep, eating on the land for one month. A ranch leases the number of AUMs the land can carry, which depends on rainfall and forage, not on the acreage alone. On much of Arizona's desert and grassland the carrying capacity is low, so an acre supports very little.
Federal rangeland is the benchmark everyone quotes: the 2026 fee on BLM and Forest Service land is $1.69 per AUM, effective March 1, 2026. That does not apply to private land, and it does not apply to Arizona State Trust land. The State Land Department sets its own rate. Under Arizona's statute, state grazing rent is the AUMs on the lease multiplied by a per-AUM rate that the Land Commissioner sets on the advice of a grazing land valuation commission. We could not read the current state rate, so we quote none. If you hold or want a state lease, ask the State Land Department for the rate in effect.
The USDA number is the one to plan around for private land, and it is blunt. At $1.90 an acre, the 40.5-acre median parcel in Yavapai County earns about $77 a year. That county's median 40-plus acre parcel sold for $70,000. Dividing one by the other gives roughly 900 years of rent.
What 40-plus acre parcels actually sold for
Here is what the sale route looks like by county. These are recorded sales of vacant land of 40 acres or more between October 2024 and August 2026.
| County | Sales | Median acres | Median $/acre | Median parcel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 281 | 41.2 | $747 | $39,300 |
| Navajo | 175 | 40.9 | $880 | $42,000 |
| Cochise | 99 | 61.9 | $939 | $60,000 |
| Mohave | 339 | 43.5 | $944 | $60,000 |
| Yavapai | 188 | 40.5 | $1,398 | $70,000 |
| Coconino | 75 | 40.3 | $1,499 | $68,000 |
| Yuma | 28 | 126.1 | $2,864 | $400,000 |
| Pima | 26 | 66.0 | $4,211 | $325,900 |
| Maricopa | 99 | 69.4 | $5,356 | $350,000 |
| Pinal | 130 | 60.0 | $8,133 | $480,000 |
Statewide, 1,514 parcels of 40 acres or more sold, at a median of $1,171 an acre and $70,000 a parcel. Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz and Santa Cruz had fewer than 25 sales each and are left out. We do not show days on market by county: the MLS reported it for only 87 of the 1,514 sales, and their median was 122 days, about four months.
Our March 2026 county-roll file has 39,389 vacant parcels of 40 acres or more, and where the MLS reported it, a large parcel took about four months to sell. A sale is slow, but it ends in a check. A lease at $1.90 an acre never gets you near the sale price.