Sunflower is one of the most important among edible oil crops growing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It was introduced in the province during 1976 but commercially adopted by a large number of farmers only by 1990's. Sunflower cultivation trend kept on increasing from the year 1990 to 1999. Since then a continuous decreasing trend in adoption of sunflower has been observed. The present research work was planned to estimate the relative cost effectiveness of sunflower with competing crops like sugarcane and tobacco to find out the major factors which caused the decreasing trend of sunflower in the area. Primary data of 100 respondents was collected and analyzed in SPSS (Special Package for Social Scientists) software. Estimated results revealed that there was a key difference among target three crops profitability such as revenue per crop day of tobacco, sugarcane and sunflower were rupees 285.61, rupees 158 .93 and rupees 82.64 respectively. On the whole tobacco and sugarcane both of these crops were more profitable for the farmers. As study results showed that outputinput ratio of tobacco were 3.09 followed by 3.01 of sugarcane. While sunflower's output-input ratio was only 1.86, which was very low than both of the competing crops (tobacco and sugarcane). In terms of net profit nonadopters of sunflower were earning more income than adopters of sunflower with lesser profit. This economic benefit in other crops was the major reason for sunflower non-adoption in selected districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.