Tequila's Two Official Export Numbers Differ by Eleven Million Litres

Two numbers, both official, one flow

Mexico exported 408.0 million litres of tequila in 2025 according to the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, which certifies every litre leaving the country under the denomination. Mexico exported 397.1 million litres according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, which counts what crosses a customs frontier.

The gap is 10.9 million litres — 2.67 per cent of the load-bearing volume of the entire category. Neither figure is wrong. Both cover the same twelve months, the same product and the same border.

This is not a curiosity. Every model of the agave spirits market rests on one of those two numbers, and our Global Agave Spirits report names the divergence as one of its five principal risks rather than reconciling it away. Understanding why they differ tells you something about the category that neither number does on its own.

Where the two series measure

The CRT’s figure is a compliance instrument. A certificate of export is issued against a lot at the distillery gate, against a producer’s authorisation and a denomination of origin declaration. It is counted because the appellation requires it, not because a tax is owed. The preliminary full-year figure reported in January was 407.8 million litres, up 1.27 per cent on the 402.7 million of 2024.

The agriculture ministry’s figure is a trade statistic. It counts declarations, classified by tariff line, valued in dollars and weighted in kilograms. It exists to measure trade, not to certify a product.

Normally two series measuring the same flow from either end of a border converge to a small definitional gap. Here the gap is 2.7 per cent, and the reason is visible in the CRT’s own presentation split.

Nearly a quarter of it crosses the border as liquid

Of the 407.8 million litres exported in 2025, the CRT records 311.59 million litres bottled at origin and 96.39 million litres shipped in bulk. That is 76.40 per cent bottled and 23.64 per cent bulk.

A bulk litre and a bottled litre are not the same object at a border. One is a tariff line for an alcoholic beverage in an isotank; the other is a case of finished goods with glass, closure, label, carton and a consumer price attached. They carry different classifications, different values per litre and different net weights. The value of the bottle is added after the frontier, in the destination market, by whoever fills it.

Bulk tequila is legal and long-established — it can be shipped in containers up to 26,000 litres and bottled abroad by a plant that is not an authorised producer, provided a co-responsibility agreement is filed with the CRT and the bottling conditions are met. So a quarter of Mexico’s tequila export leaves the country as an unfinished industrial input and arrives on a shelf somewhere else as a finished brand.

That is enough to explain why a compliance count and a customs count of the same year will not agree: they are counting different things at two points where the physical item has different properties. We cannot apportion the 10.9 million litres between definitional difference and genuine timing, and nobody publishes the reconciliation. What is certain is that a single-figure answer to “how much tequila does Mexico export” does not exist.

The finding that inverts the story

The same dataset carries a split that almost nobody quotes, and it cuts against the category’s own narrative.

Mixto is 28.81 per cent of what Mexico makes and 31.72 per cent of what it exports. Nearly 77 per cent of every mixto litre produced leaves the country, against 67 per cent of every 100 per cent agave litre.

So the cheaper half of the category is the more export-dependent half, and the premium half is more domestic. That is the reverse of the assumption behind most commentary, which treats mixto as the declining domestic base being displaced by a premium export product. In the 2025 numbers the premium product stayed home proportionally more than the cheap one.

Two things explain it, and both are consistent with the rest of the data. First, cheap agave at MXN 7.62 a kilogram makes mixto profitable to make and easy to price into a price-sensitive export market. Second, the export book is measured in litres, not dollars — and a litre of mixto is the cheapest way to add a litre to an export total. The premium tier’s growth is in value per bottle, which this series does not show at all.

The number that actually matters is the difference between two years

Put the export series beside the production series and the 2025 story reorganises itself.

Production rose from 495.8 million litres to 583.53 million — an extra 87.7 million litres. Certified exports rose from 402.7 million to 407.8 million — an extra 5.1 million litres.

That is 5.8 per cent of the increase appearing as export growth. The other 94 per cent of the record production year did not leave Mexico as a certified export shipment. It went into domestic sales, into stock, or into the pipeline — and the previous article in this series shows why that matters: US supplier depletions of 32.1 million cases are roughly 46 million litres below the volume certified for the United States, which is the size of the buffer the three-tier system is holding.

A production record that is 94 per cent invisible in the export series is not a demand event. It is an inventory event, and inventory has to clear before the next order is placed.

Where the name is least protected

The denomination is recognised in 58 countries covering 97.5 per cent of exported volume. That last figure is the one to hold on to: 2.5 per cent of Mexico’s tequila exports go to destinations where the name does not have legal protection as a denomination of origin.

That is roughly ten million litres — coincidentally almost exactly the size of the gap between the two official series — leaving for markets where “tequila” is not enforceable as a protected term. The category’s expansion into China, Brazil and India, which the report’s regulatory chapter flags, is precisely a campaign to convert that residual into recognised volume. Until it does, a not insignificant slice of the export book is being sold where the appellation cannot follow it.

Two official numbers, 10.9 million litres apart, and neither is an error. One counts compliance, the other counts customs, and the 96 million litres that leave without their bottles explains most of the distance between them. The right response is not to pick a figure. It is to know which one a given decision depends on — because a bottling investment, a tariff exposure and a brand valuation all turn on different versions of the same litre.