Is making maple syrup worth it? Costs, yields and prices

Start with the Producers Manual's rule of thumb: a bucket tap on a sugar maple gives about 10 gallons of sap in an average season, which boils down to roughly a quart of syrup. Extension ranges around that: 5 to 15 gallons of sap per tap (UMaine), 8 to 10 (UNH), 6 to 10 (Ohio State). Open-grown trees with big crowns can give up to half a gallon of syrup (Cornell).

Commercial producers do better because they are on vacuum tubing. USDA's June 2026 report puts the US average at 0.357 gallons of syrup per tap across all methods, and the 2022 manual says well-run high-vacuum systems regularly top 0.5 gallons. For planning it suggests 0.20 gallons per tap with traditional methods and 0.35 or more with modern collection. The yield estimator runs these by collection method.

Using a quart per bucket tap, and 43 gallons of 2% sap per gallon of syrup for the ranges, here is what two backyard sizes produce. Values use USDA's 2025-crop prices from the June 2026 report; they are what the syrup would sell for, not what you would clear.

Sap weighs about 8⅓ pounds a gallon, so the 50-tap season is also two tons of sap carried out of the woods, 5 gallons at a time.

The water load sets the hours. At 2 °Brix you must evaporate about 42 gallons of water for every gallon of syrup; at 8 °Brix, after reverse osmosis, fewer than 11. How fast it leaves depends on the pan. Ohio State's rule for a flat pan is ¾ to more than 1½ gallons an hour per square foot of surface, which makes a gallon of syrup 28 to 56 hours of continuous boiling on a one-square-foot pan, or 9 to 18 hours on a 24 by 18 inch pan. UNH's backyard table gives 1 gallon an hour for a 12 by 20 inch pan, 3 for 19 by 36, 5 for 2 feet by 33 inches, and 15 for a 2 by 4 foot evaporator with a flue pan.

UNH's sizing arithmetic is the one to copy: 25 taps at a gallon a run, boiled in 6 hours, needs 4.2 gallons an hour, so a pan rated about 5. The 2022 manual adds that a boil shorter than about 3 hours is inefficient once setup and cleanup are counted. A hobby reverse-osmosis unit changes the picture: in Cornell's beginner notebook, a producer with 25 taps on a 2 by 4 foot flat pan cut a boil from about 8 hours to 4 with a roughly $360 unit. Run your own numbers in the sap to syrup calculator.

Wood. The 2022 manual plans on 1 cord of dry hardwood per 75 to 100 taps on an efficient evaporator; UNH says at least half a cord per 50 taps. On a real evaporator a cord makes roughly 20 to 30 gallons of syrup (the 2006 manual's worked example gives 19 to 25; a 1977 Forest Service cost study measured 25 to 30; Ohio State says 22). Open-pan hobby boiling is far less efficient: in a 2003 Wisconsin survey of 62 producers, wood users averaged 2,100,000 BTU per gallon of syrup against 331,000 for oil and gas users, with a range from 170,000 to 5,343,000. Ohio State puts the theoretical need at 400,000 BTU per gallon from 2% sap.

Propane. Purpose-built LP evaporators in the 1977 study burned about 5 gallons of propane per gallon of syrup. A turkey-fryer burner under an open pot wastes most of its heat, and Cornell warns the propane bill can approach the value of the finished syrup.

Gear. The sourced figures are few: tubing installs averaged $7.50 to $20 per tap in the US as of 2022 (the manual), and Cornell's hobby RO example cost about $360. Buckets, spouts, pans and thermometers vary too much by seller for us to quote. Put your own prices into the cost calculator, which spreads equipment over the years you will use it.

The numbers come from USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, Crop Production, released June 11, 2026. Prices are for the 2025 crop, the latest published; 2026 prices arrive in June 2027.

Two more numbers put the hobby in context. Sap itself is a commodity: 14.1 million gallons were sold in 2025 at an average of $0.30 a gallon. And the US made 5.88 million gallons of syrup in 2026 from 16.5 million taps, more than half of it in Vermont. If you plan to sell any of yours, read your state's rules on the selling maple syrup pages first; syrup under 66 °Brix is not legal to sell as maple syrup anywhere, and labeling and licensing differ by state.

It is worth it for the syrup, not the money. Ten bucket taps make about 2.5 gallons, which is a year of real maple syrup for a family and gifts for the neighbors, and at retail prices that syrup is worth around $140. Against that: 20 to 100 hours at the pan depending on your rig, firewood (the manual's planning figure is a cord per 75 to 100 taps on an efficient rig, and open-pan boiling burns far more) or a propane bill Cornell says can rival the syrup's value, and gear that pays back over years. The cost calculator leaves your time out of the number on purpose, because at this scale the time is the point.

If you are still in, start with the backyard season plan, and keep a log. Knowing what your taps actually gave you is the only way to answer the question for your own trees.