For a decade, cannabis retailers have heard the same refrain from banks and payment providers: “We want to work with you, but federal law says you’re a Schedule I risk.” The message has been consistent even when the reasoning was not. Licensed dispensaries, operating legally under state law, tracking every product to the gram, paying employees and taxes, have been lumped into the same risk bucket as unregulated criminal enterprises.
The result has been predictable and perverse: higher merchant fees, slower settlements, punitive cash-handling requirements, inflated cost of capital and financial partnerships engineered more around legal anxiety than business fundamentals.
President Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III does not suddenly make cannabis federally “legal.” It does not pass SAFE Banking. It does not erase every compliance complexity or patchwork contradiction between states. It does something the industry has never had before by demolishing the central fiction that state-licensed cannabis retailers are equivalent to illicit drug traffickers.
That quiet implosion of a legal myth creates a rare thing in cannabis finance: leverage.
It may be only a sliver, but it’s real and the smartest dispensary operators will know exactly what to do with it.
Retail owners now have a compelling reason and a defensible federal framework to reevaluate every major financial touchpoint in their business: merchant fees, settlement terms, reserve and liquidity requirements, loan covenants, depository relationships, insurance underwriting, payroll rails and access to basic treasury tools that most retailers take for granted.
For the first time, the answer to the question, “Are these businesses legitimate?” is “Yes,” at least in the eyes of the federal government.
This shift lands at a moment when cannabis is already a major economic engine. The legal cannabis sector supports roughly 425,000 to 440,000 full-time equivalent jobs across the United States. Dispensaries alone have generated more than $24.7 billion in state adult-use cannabis tax revenue since 2014, including a record-setting $4.4 billion collected in 2024. Those figures matter in negotiations because they prove what banks have always cared about most: measurable scale, auditable compliance and predictable cash flow.
Yet, until now, retailers couldn’t bring those facts to the bargaining table without running into federal risk objections.
Schedule III changes the math of the conversation even before Congress changes the law.
Dispensary owners should now initiate a top-to-bottom review built on three pillars of negotiation:
- Know your real baseline costs.
Retailers must gather data on their current effective cost of capital, including merchant processing fees, average settlement times, depository restrictions, cash-handling overhead, insurance premiums and reserve requirements. These are not abstract numbers as they define the actual cost of participating in the regulated economy under a federally unrecognized framework. - Benchmark against comparable retail categories.
Rescheduling provides retailers with a defensible rationale for comparing their financial treatment with that of mainstream retail sectors such as pharmacies, liquor stores, convenience chains and specialty CPG shops. Not to argue for special treatment, but to argue for equal treatment. The new leverage point is simple: we operate under higher compliance burdens than most retailers, and Schedule I no longer defines cannabis companies as contraband businesses. - Have the conversation before someone else frames it for you.
Too many cannabis retailers wait for policy reform to be perfected before negotiating. Smart operators will sit down with existing and prospective financial partners now while armed with a clear narrative: We complied when states asked us to and tracked cash flow rigorously and legitimately.
Dispensaries should be negotiating for:
- Lower merchant fees that reflect compliance transparency, not regulatory stigma.
- Faster settlements that reduce reliance on cash handling and improve liquidity.
- Clearer reserve and risk requirements based on trackable financial behavior.
- Loan covenants that reflect normalized tax treatment, not criminal operations.
- ACH, wires and payroll tools that reduce risk for employees and operators.
- Insurance underwriting that reflects auditable compliance, not legal mythology.
The payments industry could not care less about cannabis morality but has been forced to comply by federal policies that pushed legitimate retailers into a predominantly cash economy, increasing theft risk, reducing transaction visibility and inflating compliance costs for banks that choose to serve them.
This is the moment dispensary owners have been waiting for, not for a finished policy victory, but for a chance to negotiate without being told their industry is inherently illegitimate.
Schedule III gives retailers an opportunity to argue for equal financial treatment, reduced risk overhead and transparent partnerships built for durability. Savvy operators will seize this moment to secure fairer, more secure banking and payments relationships.
The smart retailers know that and now is the time, finally, so does Washington.