The Excise Survival Calculator

How much of your gram does excise really take?

Tap a product on the map, then drag price and potency to your own numbers. Watch your dot move — and see what the same biomass pays once it's refined. Defaults are standard (4★-equivalent) grade at current market prices.

Interactive Excise Map: pick a product and set price and THC; the dot moves and the results update.

The Excise Map
Tap a dot to pick a product · drag the sliders below · flip the view with the toggle.
Interactive — Choose
Interactive — Change
Price / g:
% THC:
66% to excise
$1.00
Excise / gram
$0.51
You keep / gram
Excise / year

What survives the floor

Why these are conservative. The hash and rosin numbers default to 4★ standard grade — the workhorse band that is 25–40% of a typical run and Abzu's conservative benchmark. Higher grades sell for more but yield less (5★ is 15–25% of a run, 6★ full-melt only 5–15%), so 4★ is the honest average to price against, not a best case. Per-grade channel prices are Abzu's market estimate; the tax math is the published CRA rate. Prices reviewed against current market data on 2026-07-09.

Where the tax bites and where the margin goes — one strategy read a month, for producers, processors and investors.

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Why the floor punishes the cheap gram

Canada wrote its cannabis duty on dried flower as a floor: a producer pays the greater of about C$1.00 a gram or 10% of the selling price. That was written when wholesale flower was ~$10/g, so the two sides were equal and the tax was effectively 10%. Then flower collapsed — roughly $5.81/g in early 2019 down to about $3.09/g by late 2024, and lower still on the exchange since — but the flat dollar never moved. So the dollar took over. At $3/g wholesale a producer owes the dollar, which is a third of the sale price gone before any other cost; at $1.51/g it's two-thirds; at the ~$1.22/g autumn-2025 low it's over 80%; on trim it's absurd (the dollar is ~770% of trim's wholesale value). The tax punishes the cheap gram hardest — the lower prices fall, the harder it bites.

The escape is not selling more cheap grams — every extra commodity gram carries the same flat dollar, so volume digs the hole faster. The escape is changing what the gram becomes. Extracts — hash, rosin, oils — aren't taxed on the flat flower floor at all. They're taxed on a completely different basis, C$0.01 per mg of THC (federal $0.0025 + provincial $0.0075). So refining biomass into premium solventless does two things at once: it moves off the punishing tax basis, and the product sells for a multiple of a commodity gram (far more into medical and EU export). The gram the floor was eating becomes the gram that pays for the operation. Abzu is what makes that reachable — without trading the excise trap for a labour trap (the ice-and-bags cost centre).

A word on distillate and carts. Distillate sits off the flower floor too — but it is near-pure THC, so the per-mg basis works against it: at ~87% THC a gram carries about $8.70 of duty, roughly 73% of a $12 wholesale cart. It survives only because carts retail at $40–65/g and that margin absorbs the stamp. The lesson the map makes visible: on the extract basis, potency drives the duty — the most tax-efficient gram in the market is not the highest-THC one, it's premium hash and rosin, where a high price per gram sits against a moderate THC load.

The market, in numbers

Every figure below is current as of 2026-07-09 and sourced at the foot of this page. This is the market the floor built.

How the duty is calculated

Sources & references

Abzu Refinery · Phoenix Rising Solventless Equipment · Penticton, BC · abzurefinery.com · Not Washed. Refined.
Prices & rules reviewed against current market data 2026-07-09. Not tax advice.
Not Washed. Refined.
Not Washed. Refined.