The present work carried out in 2006 with the objectives of estimating the production costs, and the margins of commercialization of the production fresh prickly pear in the state of Hidalgo. In order to do the work, the methodologies developed by Morris (1990), by Caldentey and De Haro (2004) were used. Altogether 60 surveys, 44 to producers and 16 to dealers of tuna were applied. The results report that in Hidalgo, three types of producers are outstanding; the leader with 9%, the generic with 61 % and the basic with 30%, whose respective production costs of each one were $ 14,532/ha-1, $ 9,626/ha-1 and $ 3,686/ha-1 respectively. The commercialization cost for the production leader was $ 1.17/kg-1, where 40 % was the storage, 26 % was the transport, 24 % was the packing and 10 % was the spine removal. With regard to the costs of commercialization for the generic producer was $ 0.70/kg-1. The highest absolute margin in commercialization was obtained by the production leader, 3.50/kg-1, when commercializing prickly pear in commercial centers with $ 4.63/kg-1, in which $ 1.17/kg-1 correspond to costs and $ 2.33/kg-1 to the profits; also the highest relative margin was obtained at this level and represented 40.6 % of the consumer price. The most important factors that contributed to a better income from the production leader were the productivity and quality of the product.