The objective of this study was to estimate the cost of maize production in rural Zambia as well as to identify the factors causing these estimates to vary across households. This will inform current policy discussions and potentially identify unused policy levers that could increase Zambian smallholder farmer’s competitiveness in the future. Although this subject is perennially the subject of important policy debates such as determining the FRA’s buying price each year, data has only recently been available to empirically inform this discussion. One of the key lessons emerging from this analysis is that good data collection on this subject will continue to be important challenge in future agricultural surveys.