What Cigars Actually Cost at Wholesale, by Origin and Size

Buyers ask me for a price list before they ask me for anything else, and the honest answer is that a cigar box is not one price, it is a band. The MDC catalog carries 5,938 active products, of which 5,930 are cigars, and the per-unit price on those cigars runs from $1.00 to $1999.00. That spread is not a typo. A single tubed stick and a 60-count humidor-filler box both live in the same catalog, and a buyer who does not know which end of the range a format sits in will budget badly.

Below is what the numbers actually look like, pulled from the invoice record rather than from a supplier sell sheet.

What does a box of cigars actually cost at wholesale?

Most boxes that move through MDC land between roughly $75 and $330 per unit, with the full catalog range running $1.00 to $1999.00 per unit. A 10-count pack commonly sits near $75 to $126. A 20 or 25 count box commonly sits near $160 to $325. Outliers above $500 exist but are a small share of what venues reorder.

The band matters more than any single figure because box count, not prestige, is the first thing that moves the number. A $324.00 box of 25 and a $126.00 pack of 10 are closer in per-cigar terms than the box prices suggest. When a bar manager tells me a box “costs too much,” nine times out of ten the issue is count, not price level.

Federal excise tax is baked into every landed price in this market. The TTB sets the large cigar rate at 52.75 percent of the manufacturer or importer sale price, capped at 40.26 cents per cigar, and that cap is why the dollar gap between a mid-shelf and a high-shelf cigar is driven by leaf and labor rather than by tax.

How much does the per-cigar price change between a 10-count pack and a 25-count box?

Per-cigar price is mostly independent of box count. Across eight representative MDC catalog SKUs spanning 10, 20, 24, 25 and 60 count, per-cigar price runs from $4.78 to $12.96, and the cheapest per-cigar figure in that set comes from the largest box. Buyers should treat box count as a cash-flow decision, not a discount mechanism.

Across those eight catalog SKUs, the per-cigar price lands between $4.78 and $12.96 regardless of whether the box holds 10 cigars or 60.

Cigar	Count	Box price	Per cigar
Gurkha Grand Age Toro	60	$287.00	$4.78
La Gloria Cubana Media Tiempo Robusto	25	$163.00	$6.52
Curivari Achilles Invencibles 4	10	$75.00	$7.50
Tatuaje Cabaiguan Robustos Extra	24	$194.00	$8.08
Oscar Valladares Ciseron Blue Toro	20	$179.00	$8.95
Romeo y Julieta 1875 White Rothchilde en Tubo	10	$112.00	$11.20
Caldwell Long Live the Queen Maduro Coronet Robusto	10	$126.00	$12.60
Don Carlos Original Belicoso	25	$324.00	$12.96

A 60-count box at $287.00 ties up more cash than a 10-count pack at $112.00, but the 60-count box delivers the lowest per-cigar figure in the set. For a venue with slow turns, the 10-count pack is the right call even though the per-cigar number is worse.

What is the most common box size in the catalog?

The 20-count box is the most common format, accounting for 37.4 percent of all cigar SKUs in the MDC catalog. Packs of 10 or fewer account for 16.8 percent of cigar SKUs. Everything else splits across 24, 25, 50 and 60 count plus assorted samplers. A buyer planning shelf space should plan around 20 first.

That 37.4 percent concentration is why most humidor planning math works out in multiples of 20. If a humidor build is sized for boxes of 25, roughly a third of the catalog will sit awkwardly on the shelf.

Can you publish average prices by country of origin?

Not yet, honestly. Country of origin is populated on 41.9 percent of MDC products, which is enough to sort a shelf but not enough to publish an origin-level average anyone should budget against. An average built from 41.9 percent coverage would mostly describe which brands got tagged first, not which countries actually price higher.

What I will say directionally is that origin correlates weakly with price in our data compared with format and blend. Nicaraguan and Honduran production dominates the mid-band of the catalog, and Dominican production spans the widest range of any origin we carry. The Cigar Association of America publishes industry-level volume data if you want a market view. For regulatory definitions of what counts as a cigar versus a cigarillo, which does affect how some SKUs are packaged and priced, the FDA cigar product page is the primary reference.

I will publish origin-level price bands when coverage clears 80 percent. Not before.

Does a bigger cigar cost more?

Size moves price less than most buyers expect. The average cigar in the catalog, measured across the 4,199 cigars with recorded dimensions, is 5.77 inches long with a 51.6 ring gauge. Robustos and toros cluster tightly around that average, and the price difference between a 5 x 50 and a 6 x 54 in the same line is usually a few percent, not a tier.

Where size genuinely moves price is at the extremes. A 7-inch 60 ring gauge cigar uses noticeably more filler, and a short 4-inch petit format uses less. Between those poles, which is where the large majority of the catalog sits, blend and wrapper drive the number. Buyers who assume a bigger stick justifies a higher shelf price are usually wrong on cost and right on customer perception, which is its own argument.

How often does a venue reorder the same cigar?

Across 1,201 repeat purchases of the same cigar by the same venue, the median gap between orders is 112 days and the average is 161 days. That means a typical box of 20 takes roughly a quarter to clear in a single location. Buyers should size the first order against a 112-day burn, not a 30-day one.

The gap between median and average tells you something useful. A median of 112 days with an average of 161 days means a long tail of SKUs that sit much longer than the typical one. Those are the boxes that age out, dry out, or get forgotten behind the fast movers. For hospitality accounts running a small humidor, that tail is the argument for 10-count packs on anything unproven.

What should a first order actually look like?

A reasonable first order for a single-location venue is four to six SKUs, weighted toward 20-count boxes in the $160 to $200 range, plus one or two 10-count packs in the $75 to $126 range for testing. Total exposure lands around $900 to $1,300. Reorder off the 112-day median once real sell-through data exists.

Test wide, commit narrow. Buy the 10-count pack of the thing you are unsure about, buy the 20-count box of the thing your regulars already ask for, and let the invoice record tell you which is which in a quarter. The buyer’s guide walks through the format mix in more detail, and retail accounts usually need a wider SKU count than hospitality does for the same dollar exposure.

Sources and method

Figures come from the MDC invoice corpus of 24,367 line items linked to products, covering 2016-04-19 through 2026-10-13, joined against a live catalog of 5,938 active products. Dimension averages use the 4,199 cigars with recorded measurements. Reorder cadence uses 1,201 repeat purchases of the same cigar by the same venue. Origin coverage stands at 41.9 percent of products, which is why no origin-level price average appears above. Current as of 2026-10-14.

Prices listed here are live catalog figures and move with supplier pricing. If you want to check a specific format or count against your own shelf plan, the full catalog is searchable by size and box count.

Written by Peter Roth. Last reviewed 2026-10-14.