The No-BS Guide to What Bare Land Is Actually Selling for Per
Acre

By Justin Head | Ozarks
Land Report | Updated September 2026 · Data through August 31, 2026. Updated monthly as new closings post.

Buying or selling land in Crawford County? Start with our Crawford County farms and land page.

Here’s the number, right up front, because that’s the whole point of
this report:

What
is bare land worth per acre in Crawford County, Missouri?

Median: $3,851 per acre across three years of qualifying closings (call it $3,850)
Market segment medians: $2,402 to $4,705 per acre,
depending on where the ground sits and what kind of ground it is
2026 sample: 12 qualifying closed sales, approximately 1,308 acres and $4.40 million in total volume, median $3,351 per acre
Full dataset: 53 qualifying closed sales from August 1, 2023 through August 31, 2026, totaling 5,229 acres and $20.6 million in volume

These figures describe qualifying transactions reported in MARIS under the report’s stated screening method. They are not a census of every transfer of land in the county.

Bare land in Crawford County, 30 acres or more under the screen
described below, has traded at a three-year median of $3,851 per acre.
No algorithm. No portal estimate. Just closed transactions drawn from
the MLS record.

Crawford County is not one market, though, and that median hides the
thing that actually matters to you: the county’s four market segments
run from $2,402 to $4,705 per acre at the median. Where your ground
sits, and what kind of ground it is, changes the answer more than
anything else on this page.

If you’d rather have an estimate than real data, Zillow is thataway.
If you want to know what your ground would actually bring, and where
this market has been heading, keep reading.

Prefer a copy for your files or your coffee table? Download the full report as a PDF.

Why AI often gets your
land’s value wrong

I hear it almost weekly now. A seller calls me and says, “Well,
ChatGPT says my farm is worth $9,200 an acre.” Or Zillow says. Or
Perplexity says. And they’re often wrong, sometimes by a lot. Here’s
why, and it’s not because the machines are dumb. It’s because the data
they’re fed is contaminated in three specific ways:

1. They often can’t reliably separate the dirt from the
improvements. When a 60-acre farm with a $250,000 house and a
$60,000 shop sells for $700,000, a simple price-per-acre calculation
records that sale as $11,667 per acre. It wasn’t. The dirt in that sale
was worth maybe $390,000, about $6,500 an acre. The rest was lumber,
concrete, and copper wire. Closed-sale records do not reliably allocate
the purchase price between the land and the improvements, and public
portals generally do not provide a dependable land-only allocation. An
automated answer built from those records can therefore overstate
bare-land value.

2. Missouri has no statewide requirement that real estate
sale prices be publicly disclosed. That leaves public valuation
tools with incomplete price data, especially for rural land. Asking
prices are not closed values, and an automated tool may remember the
wish instead of the result.

3. An algorithm has never walked your farm. It
doesn’t know your east 40 was select-cut five years ago. It doesn’t know
the “road frontage” is a shared gravel easement with no maintenance
agreement. It doesn’t know whether electric is at the corner or $40,000
away. On bare land, those things can materially change value. I’ve
written about most of them, including utilities,
road
agreements, and creeks
and water rights, because they’re where land value actually
lives.

This report applies the same objective screen to every transaction:
Farm or Land & Lots, at least 30 acres, and zero reported bedrooms
and bathrooms. A blank bedroom or bathroom field is treated as zero. For
purposes of this analysis, those transactions are referred to as
“bare-land” or “bare-dirt” sales. The screen substantially reduces
residential influence, but it cannot guarantee that every tract was
completely free of buildings or other improvements. Same filter, same
method as my quarterly Ozarks land market reports. I pull these by hand
because I want the real answers for my clients.

What three years of dirt say

Line up all 53 closings by year:

Year	Sales	Median $/acre	Weighted $/acre	Range
2023 (Aug-Dec, partial)	5	$2,957	$3,243	$2,250 – $5,502
2024	15	$3,627	$4,116	$1,458 – $6,911
2025	21	$4,463	$4,354	$2,051 – $9,500
2026 (through August, partial)	12	$3,351	$3,363	$1,721 – $8,887

Median price per acre for bare 30+ acre tracts in Crawford
County: $2,957 (2023, partial year), $3,627 (2024), $4,463 (2025),
$3,351 (2026 through August). The median rose 51% from the 2023 partial
period through 2025.

The median rose about 51% from the partial 2023 period through 2025,
including a 23% step up between 2024 and 2025. The 2026 median is about 25% below the 2025 median on 12 qualifying sales. Both 2023 and 2026
are partial years; those figures describe the observed sample and do not
establish a guaranteed market floor.

Owners who purchased comparable bare ground before 2024 may already
have benefited from the market’s repricing. If you’ve been sitting on a
2022 opinion of your land’s value, it’s stale in the other
direction.

The four price
segments of Crawford County

“What’s an acre worth in Crawford County?” is really four questions,
because this county trades in four distinct market segments. The
following segments summarize the complete August 2023-August 2026
dataset.

Market segment	What it is	Sales	Median $/acre	Range
Bourbon and the I-44 north corridor	Open and mixed ground across the county’s northern townships; the highest segment median in the dataset	16	$4,705	$2,600 – $8,088
Cuba / Leasburg corridor	Interstate-corridor ground and smaller tracts around the county’s central towns; the highest upper-end result in the dataset	10	$4,053	$3,165 – $9,500
Steelville and the Meramec	County seat and river country, from small recreational tracts to large timber blocks; the widest spread in the dataset	17	$3,250	$1,458 – $8,887
Southern timber country	Big timber and remote recreational ground in the county’s southern reaches; the lowest segment median in the dataset	10	$2,402	$1,721 – $3,340

The pattern is clear: taken together, the Bourbon/northern and
Cuba/Leasburg segments produced a median of $4,194 per acre. The Steelville/Meramec and southern-timber segments produced a median of $2,900 per acre, a difference of roughly 45%. The highest segment median
was $4,705 and the lowest was $2,402, close to a two-to-one spread. Good
huntable timber in the south end trades in the low- to mid-$2,000s, and
that is not a knock on it. These are different markets that happen to
share a courthouse.

A footnote, because transparency is the product here: these are
analytical market segments, not fixed geographic boundaries. Assignments
were based on MLS market area, community, and predominant ground type.
That is why some ground appears in a segment named for a different
community; open corridor tracts trade with the northern market, while
timbered tracts trade with the market that matches the ground. Every
tract in this dataset is located in Crawford County, although some are
assigned to adjacent MLS market areas and some carry mailing addresses
for towns outside the county.

What tract size does to
price per acre

The following tiers summarize the complete August 2023-August 2026
dataset:

Tract size	Sales	Median $/acre	Range
30-50 acres	17	$4,106	$2,286 – $9,500
50-80 acres	13	$3,627	$1,721 – $8,088
80-120 acres	13	$3,993	$2,051 – $6,006
120+ acres	10	$3,521	$1,458 – $6,911

Smaller tracts do not always bring more per acre. In this dataset the four tier medians fall inside a band of about 17%, from $3,521 to $4,106, and the smallest tier produced the highest median. These are
simple groupings rather than controlled comparisons. Acreage alone did
not determine price per acre in Crawford County; location, access,
usability, and ground quality also matter, and the segment table above
separates the market far more than this one does.

The 2026 market at a glance

Twelve qualifying bare-land transactions closed through August 2026, representing approximately 1,308 acres and $4.40 million in total sales volume.

The median sale price was $3,351 per acre and the acreage-weighted average was $3,363 per acre. Individual results ran from $1,721 to
$8,887 per acre, a spread of more than five to one. Four of the 12 closings came from the Steelville segment, three from the southern timber segment, three from the Cuba and Leasburg segment, and two from the Bourbon and I-44 north segment.

2026 is a partial year through August 31. These figures describe the
observed sample and do not establish a guaranteed market floor.

How fast does
bare land sell in Crawford County?

Time to contract (final listing)	Sales
7 days or less	5
8-14 days	3
15-30 days	5
31-60 days	5
61-179 days	18
180 days or more	11

Across the 47 closings with a recorded marketing period, the median time to contract was 72 days. Thirteen of the 47 went under contract within 30 days and 18 within 60 days.

Eleven sales required 180 days or longer, with the longest
approaching two years. Marketing time can reflect price, access,
property condition, seasonality, relisting strategy, and other
tract-specific factors. The data show a wide range of exposure times,
but they do not establish why any particular property took longer to
sell.

One opinion from the field, clearly labeled as such: in my experience
walking this ground, price is the single biggest lever on marketing
time.

How this report was built

This analysis covers 53 closed MLS transactions from August 1, 2023 through August 31, 2026. Qualifying transactions were limited to
properties classified in the MLS as Farm or Land & Lots, containing
at least 30 acres, and reporting zero bedrooms and zero bathrooms, with
a blank bedroom or bathroom field treated as zero. Duplicate records
were removed, and the statistics were calculated using the acreage and
closed-sale information reported in the source records. Where a tract
closed and a portion of that same tract closed again inside the study
period, only the original transaction is counted, so no acreage is
counted twice.

For purposes of this report, a “qualifying bare-land transaction” is
a closed MLS sale classified as Farm or Land & Lots, containing at
least 30 acres, and reporting zero bedrooms and zero bathrooms in the
MLS record.

This screening method is intended to reduce the influence of
residential improvements, but it does not establish that every included
tract was completely free of improvements. Some properties may contain
fencing, utilities, wells, driveways, ponds, outbuildings, cabins, or
other improvements that were not reflected in the MLS bedroom and
bathroom fields. MLS information may be incomplete or entered
inconsistently. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

A few more details, in the interest of full transparency. All 53 transactions are located in Crawford County; some are assigned to
adjacent MLS market areas and some carry mailing addresses for towns
outside the county. Segments are assigned by MLS market area, then
community and predominant ground type. Time to contract reflects each
property’s final listing period. Six transactions were entered into the
MLS without an active marketing period or with no recorded marketing
time; they are included in all price statistics but excluded from the
time-to-contract calculations, which therefore cover 47 of the 53 sales. Using cumulative days across relistings instead, the median increases from 72 to 73 days, and 12 sales rather than 11 required 180 days or
more. The pattern holds either way you count it. Both 2023 and 2026 are
partial years and are labeled as such everywhere they appear.

The annual, market-segment, tract-size, and time-to-contract tables
report only aggregated market statistics. No property addresses, MLS
numbers, photographs, listing remarks, agents or brokerages are
identified.

Based on information from Mid America Regional Information
Systems, Inc. for the period August 1, 2023 through August 31, 2026. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

So what’s your land
worth?

Somewhere in those tables. Where you land inside your segment comes
down to the things no algorithm can see: open versus timbered, how it
was cut and when, legal access versus handshake access, utilities at the
road or a quarter mile away, water, neighbors, and how the property
hunts or grazes. In a county with this much internal spread, those final
property-specific adjustments are walked, not calculated.

I’ll give you the real number, and I’ll show you the comparable sales
and methodology behind it, the same way this report shows you the
market’s actual ranges and trends. No charge, no pressure, and if the
honest answer is “hold it and let it grow,” that’s the answer you’ll
get. Start here: What’s my land
worth?

Frequently asked questions

What is an acre of land worth in Crawford County, Missouri in
2026? Based on the 53 qualifying MLS closings from August 1, 2023 through August 31, 2026, involving tracts classified as Farm or Land
& Lots, containing at least 30 acres, and reporting zero bedrooms
and zero bathrooms in the MLS record, bare land in Crawford County
carries a three-year median of $3,851 per acre. Market segment medians
run from $2,402 to $4,705 per acre. In the 12 qualifying closings through August 31, 2026, the median was $3,351 per acre on a partial-year sample. These figures describe qualifying transactions reported in MARIS under the report’s stated screening method. They are not a census of every transfer of land in the county.

Have Crawford County land prices gone up? The median
rose about 51% from the partial 2023 period through 2025, including a
23% step up between 2024 and 2025. The 2026 partial-year median of $3,351 per acre, on 12 qualifying sales through August 31, sits about 25% below the 2025 median. Partial-year figures describe the observed
sample and do not establish a guaranteed market floor.

Why doesn’t Zillow settle what my land is worth?
Zillow itself states that vacant land is not eligible for a Zestimate. A
portal page may still display asking-price, tax, prior-sale, or
user-submitted information, but none of those figures substitutes for a
closed-sale analysis built on a stated, consistent screen, shown along
with its methodology and its limits.

Why did ChatGPT or Perplexity give me a different
number? AI tools may summarize public listing and portal data
that do not reliably separate improvements from land or asking prices
from actual closings. They’ve also never seen your timber, your access,
or your utilities. Use them to learn concepts, not to price a specific
farm in a state without comprehensive public sale-price reporting.

What makes one Crawford County farm worth $2,400 an acre and
another $4,700? Mostly market segment and ground type: the
Bourbon/northern and Cuba/Leasburg segments together produced a median of $4,194 per acre against $2,900 for the Steelville/Meramec and southern-timber segments, a difference of roughly 45%. The highest
segment median is close to double the lowest. Within a segment, access,
utilities, timber condition, and overall usability decide the rest.
Tract size did much less work than owners expect: the four size-tier medians in this dataset fall inside a band of about 17%.

How long does it take to sell bare land in Crawford
County? Across the 47 qualifying closings with a recorded marketing period, the median time to contract was 72 days. Thirteen of the 47 went under contract within 30 days, 18 within 60 days, and 11 took 180 days or longer, with the longest approaching two years. Individual
marketing periods varied widely, and the data do not establish why any
particular property took longer.

How do I find out what my specific land is worth?
Get a valuation from someone who has both the closed-sale data and boots
that have walked ground in this county. I provide that as a free,
no-obligation breakdown, with the comparable sales shown, not
hidden.

Buying or selling land here? Visit our Crawford County farms and land page.

Explore the Complete Bare Dirt Report Series

See closed-sale land-price data for all five counties served by Ozarks Land Report:

What is bare land worth per acre in Crawford County, Missouri?

Why AI often gets your land’s value wrong