How Much Is an Acre Worth in Prince William County?

The short answer

Prince William County's vacant-land median sold price runs about $165,000 to $175,000, and 71% of land sales in the county are under five acres. That skew toward small parcels is the single biggest thing to understand about Prince William's numbers — they reflect a market dominated by smaller lots, not large farm tracts. For contrast, Virginia's statewide average agricultural land value is about $5,434 per acre.

What moves value in Prince William

Prince William sits closer to the Washington, D.C. suburbs than its neighbors, and its land market reflects that — smaller parcels, more development pressure, and less of the large working-farm inventory you'd find in Fauquier or Loudoun. Terrain runs from suburban-edge acreage near Manassas and Gainesville to more rural ground toward Nokesville and Haymarket. Prince William's western edge, especially around Nokesville and Haymarket, still has meaningful farmland, and those areas sit close enough to the region's data-center corridor that landowners there are more likely than most in the county to eventually hear from a landman or broker — even though, as the Digital Gateway's collapse showed, proximity to the corridor is no guarantee a project gets built.

Land-use taxation here follows Virginia's standard framework rather than Fauquier's sliding-scale approach: a change of use, or a rezoning application to a non-qualifying district, can trigger rollback taxes covering the five most recent complete tax years, plus interest. Selling to a buyer who keeps the land in agricultural use does not trigger it.

The county has also been the site of the region's most dramatic recent data-center reversal. The PW Digital Gateway, a roughly 2,100-acre rezoning assemblage along Pageland Lane, was voided by the courts, affirmed on appeal in March 2026, and abandoned by the developer in July 2026, after landowners had been paid roughly $315,000 to $515,000 per acre under option. The county then denied a second large proposal, Dulles Cloud South, on about 2,000 acres, on July 9, 2026, and paused a related overlay-district rewrite. A completed 2022 sale in Gainesville — 103 acres to NTT at roughly $2.5 million per acre — shows the numbers are real when a deal does close, but that sale is now several years old and predates the current, more cautious posture.

What a per-acre figure leaves out in Prince William

Prince William's land data is dominated by small lots, so an average per acre drawn from all recorded sales describes a market most farm owners are not actually in.

About 71 per cent of the county's land sales are parcels under five acres, and the vacant-land median sale price has run roughly $165,000 to $175,000. A genuine farm parcel has few recent local comparables, which is why pricing here leans on the neighbouring counties more than it does elsewhere.

Use value is a separate number again: for Tax Year 2026 the state's advisory council put Prince William's average agricultural use value at $930 an acre on soil classes I through VII, the highest of the four counties covered on this site.

The speculative layer has thinned. The Digital Gateway rezoning was voided and the developer withdrew in July 2026, and the county denied a second large proposal that month. What is left is the Rural Crescent market around Nokesville and Haymarket, priced on its own merits.

Land vs. improved farm

Improved farm sales are less common in Prince William than in Fauquier or Loudoun, simply because there's less large-acreage farmland left in the county. Most transactions here involve smaller residential-scale or transitional parcels, which is part of why the county's vacant-land median sits well below its neighbors. Because there's so little large-acreage inventory left, even a single farm-scale sale can noticeably shift what limited comparable data exists for months at a time.

The data-center caveat for Prince William

Prince William just went through the most significant data-center policy reversal in the region. With the Digital Gateway dead and Dulles Cloud South denied, the county's overlay-district rewrite is paused, and there's no large pending assemblage active in the county as of this writing. That doesn't mean data centers are done in Prince William — Gainesville's 2022 NTT sale shows completed deals do happen — but it means the momentum that drove Pageland Lane's option pricing has stalled, at least for now. That Gainesville sale is also the oldest deal on the regional price ladder, which is itself a signal: there hasn't been a comparably sized completed data-center land sale reported in the county since.

For the full regional price ladder, see our data center land value page; for what an approach from a developer actually looks like, and why deals like this one collapse, see what a data center offer really means.

How to get a real number

With most Prince William land sales concentrated in small parcels, a county-wide median is a limited guide to what your specific property is worth. That's especially true for a landowner with a larger tract — comparables for a 20-, 50-, or 100-acre parcel can be hard to find nearby, and a fair read on value may require looking at comparable sales from a somewhat wider area than the county median alone can offer, and factoring in the county's current, more cautious posture toward any new data-center proposals. For a broader county-by-county comparison, see our land value page; for more on the local market, see our Prince William County page.

Sources

• USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture: Prince William County profile (PDF)