Tea Statistics 2026: The Definitive Data Hub on Global Production, Consumption & the US Market

Global tea output reached approximately 7.05 million metric tonnes in 2024, according to data compiled by the FAO's Intergovernmental Group on Tea and reported in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal's 2025 Global Tea Report. That represented a rise of about 6.8% over the prior year (from roughly 6.6 million tonnes), and production has nearly doubled over the past two decades.

Seven countries each produce more than 100,000 tonnes of tea a year, and together they account for the overwhelming majority of the global harvest. Production is heavily concentrated: just two countries, China and India, grow more than three-quarters of it.

One quotable way to frame it: nearly four out of every five cups of tea on earth begin as a leaf grown in either China or India.

Here are the leading producers by volume, using 2024 figures reported via the FAO-linked 2025 Global Tea Report. China and India dominate; Kenya is the standout in exported black tea, as it retains relatively little for domestic use.

China's lead is built largely on green tea, while India (Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiri) and Kenya are anchored in black tea. Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea, per the FAO.

Tea is consumed almost everywhere it is grown. Over 70% of global production is retained for domestic consumption in producing countries, per the 2025 Global Tea Report, which is why the giant producers (China, India) are also among the giant consumers.

On the trade side, preliminary ITC data for 2024 put global tea exports at about 1.94 million tonnes, or roughly 27.6% of the crop. The leading exporters are Kenya, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Green tea makes up a smaller slice of trade — around 385,760 tonnes, or about 20% of global tea exports.

The FAO has noted that consumption has grown fastest in China, India, and other emerging economies, while per-capita consumption in many traditional European markets has been declining for more than a decade — including a long-running softening in the UK.

Total production tells you who grows tea; per-capita figures tell you who actually drinks the most relative to population. By that measure the leaders are not the giant producers but smaller, tea-steeped cultures — led, consistently, by Turkey.

The table below reflects widely-cited per-capita figures (kg of tea per person per year). Note the caveat: the most complete cross-country per-capita dataset in broad circulation traces to a Statista compilation that is several years old, so treat these as directional rankings rather than precise 2026 values. The relative order — Turkey first, then Ireland and the UK — has held steady in more recent commentary.

For perspective on Turkey's appetite: the average Turkish tea drinker is often cited as getting through on the order of 1,000+ small glasses of tea a year.

The United States is, per the Tea Association of the USA, the third-largest tea-importing country in the world (after Russia and Pakistan) and historically one of the largest tea-consuming nations. US tea consumption has grown enormously over the long run — the Tea Association notes it climbed from under $2 billion to more than $10 billion in sales over roughly two decades.

For wholesale market size, the most-cited benchmark figure is about $13.6 billion in US wholesale tea sales in 2022 (Tea Association of the USA data, as compiled by Statista) — up from roughly $1.84 billion in 1990. Among segments, ready-to-drink (RTD) tea is the largest, and on recent retail-scanner data the canned/bottled tea segment alone runs in the multi-billion-dollar range annually.

The long view is unambiguous: the US tea market has roughly seven-folded in nominal dollar terms since 1990.

In 2023, Americans consumed close to 86 billion servings of tea — nearly 4 billion gallons, per the Tea Association of the USA. And the format is distinctly American: roughly 75–80% of all the tea consumed in the US is iced, not hot.

That preference is why RTD bottled and canned teas have been the fastest-growing part of the category. Several points the Tea Association reports:

• Iced dominates: about three-quarters of US tea is consumed cold.
• RTD is the largest segment and has been the fastest-growing new product type in the supermarket.
• Bagged and loose tea (the traditional segment) remains a multi-billion-dollar business but is a smaller share of total category spending than RTD.
• Specialty and premium tea is a fast-growing slice, reflecting consumer interest in single-origin and higher-quality leaf.

Demographically, the Tea Association reports that more than four in five US consumers drink tea, with millennials among the most likely to do so.

Globally, black tea is the most-produced and most-consumed type, though green tea has grown fast — China-led green tea output has been rising at a far quicker clip than black. By the 2025 Global Tea Report, green tea accounts for roughly 32% of total global output, with black tea making up most of the rest and smaller volumes of oolong, white, and dark (post-fermented) teas.

In the US specifically, the split skews even more heavily to black. Per the Tea Association of the USA, of all tea consumed in the US:

One clean takeaway: black tea is the default cup both globally and in the US, but green tea is the faster-growing leaf on the production side.

Tea is the most-consumed beverage in the world after water, per the FAO. In raw cups, the gap over coffee is larger than many assume.

Per FAO-cited conversion factors, the world drinks roughly twice as many cups of tea as coffee. The reason is partly chemistry: a typical cup of tea uses about 2 grams of leaf, while a typical cup of coffee uses about 10 grams of grounds, so a given weight of tea stretches across far more cups. People are estimated to drink about 6 billion cups of tea daily, per the FAO.

Geography drives the split: tea is the everyday staple across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the British Isles, while coffee leads in much of the Americas and continental Europe. In the US, both beverages are deeply established — the country is a major importer and consumer of each.

This is general information, not medical advice — individual results vary, and you should talk to a clinician about your own health. That said, here is how the published research currently reads.

A large 2024 meta-analysis of 38 prospective cohort studies, pooling over 1.9 million participants, found that the highest versus lowest categories of tea consumption were associated with a relative risk of about 0.90 for all-cause mortality and about 0.86 for cardiovascular-disease mortality — i.e., a modest association with lower risk, not proof of cause and effect.

Other systematic reviews point the same direction for heart health: pooled analyses have reported roughly an 11% lower risk of coronary heart disease at the highest levels of black tea intake, and per-cup analyses have associated each additional daily cup with around a 4% lower risk of cardiovascular-disease mortality. Tea's bioactive compounds — polyphenols such as catechins and theaflavins — are the usual candidates researchers credit.

The honest caveats: these are observational associations, effect sizes are modest, study populations and brewing habits vary, and added sugar in sweetened/RTD teas changes the picture. Tea is a reasonable part of a balanced diet for most people, but it is not a treatment.

Sourcing matters, so here is the provenance of the key figures on this page:

• Global production, consumption, exports: the FAO and its Intergovernmental Group on Tea, with preliminary 2024 trade data from the International Tea Committee (ITC), as compiled in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal's 2025 Global Tea Report.
• US market size, household penetration, servings, type split, iced share: the Tea Association of the USA (and its data as aggregated by Statista for the wholesale-sales time series).
• Per-capita country rankings: widely-circulated per-capita compilations (Statista-sourced), treated as directional given their age.
• Health associations: peer-reviewed meta-analyses and systematic reviews indexed in PubMed/journal databases.

We deliberately omit figures we couldn't trace to a credible source, and we mark anything dated as "latest available." Spotted a number that's gone stale? That's exactly the kind of thing this hub exists to fix — we revise it as fresh industry data lands.