Why Is Matcha Getting More Expensive?

Almost every headline percentage circulating about matcha collapses several unrelated measurements into one phrase. They are not interchangeable, and mixing them is how a reasonable observation becomes an unreliable statistic. At minimum, these are separate things:

• Raw tencha auction prices — what wholesale buyers paid for unmilled leaf at a regional market, on a particular day.
• Finished matcha retail prices — what a consumer pays for a tin, which includes milling, packaging, brand and margin.
• Export value — the total yen Japan earned from green tea exports.
• Export volume — the tonnage shipped.
• Implied export unit value — value divided by volume, the closest thing to an average price per kilogram leaving the country.
• A company's input cost — what one specific tea house paid its suppliers.
• A company's retail increase — what that company then charged.

Each of those moved by a different amount between 2023 and 2026. Which is why the only honest way to answer “how much did matcha go up?” is to ask first: the number depends on what you are measuring.

The clearest verified benchmark comes from the JA Zen-Noh Kyoto tea market in Joyo City, where the season's first tencha auction is held each spring.

2025 opening auction average: ¥8,235 per kilogram.
2026 opening auction average: ¥14,127 per kilogram — approximately 71.6% higher, and reported as the highest in ten years.

Read that precisely, because its limits matter as much as its size:

• It is Kyoto, not Japan.
• It is an opening auction — the first day of the season, when the best early leaf and the most competitive bidding meet.
• It is therefore a premium-skewed snapshot, not a seasonal average.
• It is raw tencha, not finished matcha, and certainly not a retail price.

What it does establish is direction and force. Two consecutive years of steep increases at Japan's most closely watched tencha auction is a real signal about competition for high-grade leaf. It is not a national price index, and we will not treat it as one.

Not as a single, nationally defined statistic. The figure appears widely, and it is directionally understandable — but it is imprecise, and it usually comes from stacking measurements that describe different things.

Here is what the verified record actually contains:

• Kyoto opening-auction tencha rose roughly 70% in one year, then a further 71.6% the next.
• Nakamura Tokichi, an established Uji house, publicly attributed price revisions to sharply increased tencha and raw-material costs.
• Selected Ito En matcha products increased by approximately 50–100%.
• Japanese green-tea export value rose approximately 147% from 2023 to 2025.
• But implied export unit value over the same period rose approximately 48%.

A 147% increase in export value is not a 147% increase in matcha price.

Export value reflects both how much was sold and the unit value of what was sold. When a country ships considerably more tea and that tea is also worth more per kilogram, the total climbs far faster than any price did. Cumulative auction increases at a premium market can exceed 150%; retail increases at large companies were closer to 50 to 100%; the average kilogram leaving Japan rose about half. All three are true. None of them is “matcha prices increased 150%.”

The demand side is unusually well documented, because customs data records both value and weight.

• 2023: ¥29.2 billion in green-tea export value across 7,579 tonnes — an implied unit value of roughly ¥3,853 per kilogram.
• 2025: ¥72.1 billion across 12,612 tonnes — an implied unit value of roughly ¥5,716 per kilogram.
• 2023 to 2025: value up about 147%, volume up about 66%, implied unit value up about 48%.

In other words, Japan exported both more tea and higher-value tea. That is a picture of a market being pulled upward from outside, not of a country quietly running dry. The United States is the largest major destination for that trade by value, which is worth knowing and not worth over-detailing here.

One important limitation: Japanese customs categories do not isolate traditionally produced matcha. The powdered green tea lines can include other powdered tea products, so these figures describe green tea broadly with a strong powdered-tea component — they are not a pure matcha export dataset, and we do not present them as one.

No. The available data does not show an absolute nationwide collapse in matcha supply. Tencha production increased roughly 50% over five years, and Japan exported record quantities of green tea in 2025. A country running out of something does not usually ship more of it than ever before.

But “shortage” is a word that can describe smaller, real situations, and several of those genuinely occurred: shortages of particular grades; limited first-harvest, high-quality tencha; individual tea houses running out of specific inventories; processing bottlenecks; and demand outrunning near-term capacity.

Japan did not stop producing matcha. Demand simply began growing faster than the system could comfortably absorb.

That distinction is not pedantry. A country out of tea and a country out of capacity behave differently, resolve on different timescales, and call for different responses from anyone buying.

The supply figures are the part most often left out of the story. Tencha output reached approximately 5,336 tonnes in 2024, up roughly 50% across five years, and tencha's share of Japan's crude-tea production rose from about 4.2% to about 7.3%. Farmers responded. The response was not enough.

The reasons are physical rather than mysterious:

• Demand grew faster than production could follow.
• High-grade first-harvest leaf arrives once a year, in a short window.
• Tencha ovens — the specialised dryers that make tencha rather than sencha — are in documented short supply.
• Sorting and processing machinery is a separate constraint again.
• Milling capacity limits how quickly leaf becomes powder.
• Cold storage and finishing capacity sit at the end of the same queue.

None of that can be solved with an order form. Building processing capacity takes capital, planning permission, machinery lead times and people who know how to run it. An industry can decide to grow in a season; it cannot finish growing in one.

One consequence of sustained demand is that some Japanese tea regions are actively shifting production from sencha toward tencha. This is documented in Kyoto, in Shizuoka, in Kagoshima and in Fukuoka's Yame district, where local reporting describes producers increasing tencha production and citing shortages of tencha-processing ovens.

It should not be overstated. Not every farmer is converting, conversion requires equipment many do not have, and the pace differs sharply by region and by household.

It also has a consequence people rarely mention: moving capacity toward tencha can tighten supply in other tea categories. The leaf, the fields and the factory hours spent on matcha are not spent on sencha. What began as a matcha story is quietly becoming a story about the shape of Japanese tea agriculture as a whole.

The global matcha boom did not arrive at a thriving, expanding industry. It arrived on top of one that had been contracting for years.

Japan's tea cultivation area stood at approximately 33,400 hectares in 2025, down roughly 24.1% over ten years. The core tea workforce numbered around 11,644 people — roughly half what it was a decade earlier — with approximately 73.8% aged 60 or over. The number of crude-tea factories fell to about 3,519 in 2024, down roughly 35.6%.

Those are not decorative statistics. They describe the capacity that was available when demand arrived. A sudden surge in orders cannot conjure younger farmers, mature tea bushes that take years to establish, tencha ovens, trained processors, mills or finishing lines. It can only bid harder for what already exists.

This is the least dramatic and most important part of the explanation. The visible story is a boom. The structural story is an ageing, shrinking production base being asked to do more than it was built to do.

Heat and weather appear in most coverage, and they belong in the picture — Reuters and other reporting identified heat stress as one pressure on production. But the evidence does not establish weather as the primary cause of the price surge.

Some notable production declines had multiple explanations. Shizuoka's reduced first-flush output, for instance, has been linked to abandoned tea fields and structural change as well as to growing conditions.

Weather can tighten an already constrained market. The current pricing story cannot be reduced to one bad harvest.

Some of the most concrete evidence of pressure came from established companies themselves. Ippodo introduced purchase limits on matcha beginning in October 2024; Marukyu Koyamaen followed in November 2024. Price revisions were announced across a number of long-standing Japanese tea houses, and selected Ito En matcha products rose by roughly 50 to 100%.

These should be read for exactly what they are: documentation of what happened at those companies, with their own suppliers and their own inventories. They are not proof that every Japanese producer experienced identical conditions, and a longer list of company notices would not make them so.

Yame, in southern Fukuoka, is participating in the same shift. Local reporting documents producers there expanding matcha-related production, and processing-oven capacity has been cited as a constraint. In MAFF's 2024 crop statistics, Fukuoka ranked sixth nationally in crude-tea production, at 1,650 tonnes.

Three clarifications, because this is where careless writing usually happens:

• That 1,650-tonne figure is all crude tea for the prefecture — not matcha, and not tencha.
• MAFF does not publish a Fukuoka tencha series.
• No reliable Yame tencha price series exists that we could locate, so we cannot say Yame matcha prices rose faster or slower than elsewhere.

What is genuinely interesting about Yame right now is cultural rather than numerical. Its long-established identity rests on premium shaded teas, gyokuro above all — a tradition of extraordinary care for a small, discerning audience. That identity is now meeting enormous international demand for matcha. Yame is not abandoning gyokuro; it is holding two things at once. We wrote about the district itself in What Is Yame Matcha?

We have argued elsewhere that some matcha genuinely costs more for reasons that exist in a field and a factory — shading, first harvest, tencha processing, milling, selection. That remains true, and it is set out in Why Does High-Quality Matcha Cost More?

This article requires an additional point, and it is the important one. In a constrained market, price increasingly reflects scarcity and demand as well as quality.

A matcha that doubled in price did not necessarily double in quality.

Some of what buyers are now paying for is competition — for limited high-grade leaf, for scarce processing time, for inventory in a year when everyone wants it. That is a legitimate market mechanism. It is simply not a measurement of what is in the bowl.

Which makes the older questions more useful than ever: where the leaf was grown, when it was harvested, whether it is genuinely made from tencha and whose, how fresh it is, what is known about the producer, whether meaningful detail is offered at all — or whether the seller is relying on words like “premium” and “ceremonial” to do the work that facts should be doing.

Rising domestic raw-material prices have a predictable side effect. Japan imported substantially more green tea in 2025, at import unit values far below what Japanese tea earns on export, and industry reporting describes increased use of imported tea as domestic prices climb. In July 2026, MAFF registered “日本茶” — Japanese tea — as a Geographical Indication.

We are not accusing anyone of anything. Imported tea is not inherently poor, blending is a legitimate craft, and no brand is named here in connection with mislabelling because we have no evidence of any. The educational point is simpler and applies to every seller, ourselves included: as raw-material prices diverge, it becomes more worthwhile to ask where the leaf actually came from — and to notice who can answer.

Briefly, because this article is market education rather than an argument for our shelf. Shishū buys inside the same Japanese tea economy described above, and is subject to the same conditions as anyone purchasing Japanese leaf.

We are not publishing this to explain our prices, to signal a coming change, or to suggest anyone should act. If you want to understand what structurally creates cost in good matcha, and what we do and do not claim about our own, that article is the right place — not this one.

The last three years produced a great many percentages and very few useful ones. What the record supports is a market where demand grew quickly, where high-grade leaf and the machinery that processes it were the real constraints, and where an ageing agricultural base absorbed a surge it had not been built for.

The most durable conclusion is not about price at all. It is that headline percentages and grade words have become poor guides, and provenance, harvest, production method and transparency have become better ones.

Ask where the leaf grew, when it was cut, and who made it. Those answers age better than any number.

The rest of what we have written is in the Learn section.