Employee or owner in cannabis industry, limited banking access, 280E tax treatment, cash-heavy business.
N-04 is the household whose primary income comes from a federally illegal but state-legal industry. Limited banking access, cash-heavy operating reality, and §280E disallowance on the employer side make this corpus the testing surface for products that need to ingest non-standard income documentation.
N-04 captures a household whose financial reality is shaped by the federal-state mismatch on cannabis. Even when income is regular W-2 from a state-licensed operator, the upstream §280E disallowance — which denies the employer ordinary deductions other than COGS — bleeds into compensation structure, benefits availability, and the cash basis of the operating environment. For mass-market borrowers (median income $66k, median net worth $188k) the practical consequence is reduced banking access: many regional banks decline cannabis-adjacent accounts under FinCEN's 2014 marijuana banking guidance, leaving employees with credit-union or specialty-bank deposit relationships, limited mortgage options, and routine cash-handling friction. For the IRS Form 1040 side, employer-side §280E means certain pre-tax benefits (employer HSA contributions, dependent-care FSA, qualified transportation) are inconsistently available, so the household's tax surface looks unusual for the income tier.
The structural picture is mass-market income with above-average asset volatility: 64% homeownership (high for the income band — typically a function of older entrants to the industry rolling over prior equity), heavy auto and credit-card liabilities, and a low liquid-to-total-asset ratio. Median age 37 is older than other early-accumulation archetypes, reflecting career switchers into a newly legal industry rather than entry-level workers. State distribution skews CA, VA, and NC — the deliberate choice mirrors where licensed-cannabis employment concentrates. All 14 households carry credit-card revolving balances; nine carry mortgages.
What distinguishes N-04 from neighbouring mass-market archetypes is the documentation and banking-access surface, not the household economics. A household at this income with conventional employment is closer to U-02 or F-04; what makes N-04 a separate testing population is the W-2 income source, the limited deposit-account options, and the operating-environment cash basis. Tax preparers building cannabis-aware workflows, mortgage originators handling sourced-funds documentation from cannabis income, and consumer-lending teams evaluating MCA-adjacent risk all encounter this archetype's distinct issues.
Aggregated across the 14 N-04 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Elizabeth and Anthony hit the corpus income median almost exactly but sit well below it on net worth — the household where cannabis-industry employment has not yet translated into balance-sheet depth. Liquid net worth of $28k against $66k income is roughly five months of household spend, and the total-liability figure ($2,715) is too low for a homeowner, implying renter status. Both home purchase and retirement are off-track. This is the household where the underwriting test is whether the platform handles cannabis-industry W-2 income without penalising it.
Every N-04 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles draw on N-04 most heavily. Compliance and AML platforms use it for MRB (marijuana-related business) flagging logic, FinCEN SAR / CTR generation testing on cash-heavy deposit patterns, and BSA program calibration against legitimate state-legal employment. Mortgage and consumer-lending teams use it for fair-lending testing on industry-of-employment flags — N-04 income should not trigger underwriting declines that comparable W-2 income in other industries would not — and for sourced-funds documentation workflows against cash-intensive operating environments. Tax-software teams use it to validate that consumer-facing return preparation does not erroneously surface §280E disallowance prompts (which apply to the employer, not the employee) while correctly handling the constrained pre-tax benefit elections that often accompany this employment.
N-04 is W-2 employees and modest small operators, not large dispensary owner-operators or vertically integrated cultivator C-corps — those structurally larger cannabis businesses sit in SB-01 (LLC / S-corp pass-through) or SB-03 (multi-member partnership) with cannabis-industry overlay. Households where cannabis income is supplemental to a primary career in another industry are not N-04 — reach for that primary archetype with a sidecar income flag. Households where the federally illegal status has produced active legal exposure (criminal proceedings, asset forfeiture) are special-situations territory rather than this corpus. Hemp, CBD, and adjacent legally distinct industries with similar banking-access friction are not modeled here. Cannabis-industry retirees drawing down structured deferred compensation from an operator are not N-04 — that profile does not yet exist in v3.
Income and net-worth bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to BLS occupational-employment statistics for state-licensed cannabis cultivation, processing, and retail workers and to mass-market segments of the Survey of Consumer Finances. State distribution (CA, VA, NC concentration) reflects published state-licensing-board employment counts as of v3 synthesis. Banking-access flags, employer-benefit-constraint indicators, and sourced-funds-documentation challenges were synthesised as overlay attributes rather than estimated from a probabilistic prior. The corpus is intentionally narrow to surface the federal-state mismatch testing scenarios; it is not a representative sample of all cannabis-industry employment. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code, so calibration claims are descriptive rather than reproducible.
Low-income working family at similar income tier but without the industry-classification flag. Reach for U-02 when the test surface is EITC, SNAP, and refundable-credit eligibility rather than banking-access and industry-specific underwriting.
First-generation wealth builder at the same wealth tier without the cannabis-industry employment flag. Use F-04 for the same-income working population whose industry does not constrain banking and benefit access.
LLC / S-corp pass-through owner — the operator side of the same industry. Use SB-01 when the test surface is §280E disallowance on the entity return rather than employee-side income documentation.
Remote worker / digital nomad with multi-state tax exposure but no industry-classification friction. Surface overlap is multi-state tax; the differentiator is that N-04 has banking and underwriting friction X-01 does not.
N-04 — Cannabis Industry Worker represents a mass-market household whose primary income comes from state-licensed cannabis cultivation, processing, or retail. Median income $65,814, median net worth $188,288. The defining feature is the federal-state mismatch and its downstream effects on banking access, employer-paid benefits, and underwriting documentation.
No. §280E disallows ordinary business deductions other than COGS at the cannabis-business entity level. It does not apply to an employee's personal 1040 return. The employee files normally; the constraint shows up indirectly through reduced employer-paid benefits and compensation structure choices the §280E-exposed employer makes.
Many regional and national banks decline cannabis-adjacent depositors under FinCEN's 2014 BSA guidance. Households often bank with credit unions or specialty institutions. Mortgage origination, large-deposit sourced-funds documentation, and consumer-lending workflows have to handle that without producing fair-lending disparate-impact issues.
SB-01 covers the operator — the entity carrying §280E disallowance on its return. N-04 covers the W-2 employee or modest small-operator household where the §280E exposure is upstream. Use SB-01 when the test surface is pass-through entity-return mechanics; use N-04 when the test surface is the employee-side ripple effects.
Deterministically from a seeded sampler (Mulberry32 PRNG) in src/lib/generation/, with industry-classification flags and banking-access constraints applied as overlay attributes. Per-domain version constants are surfaced in each household's _meta block.
No. The shipped 1,451-household v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift confirmed 2026-05-09). Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI to prevent silent drift.
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