We investigate the strain state of ensembles of thin and nearly coalescence-free self-assembled GaN nanowires prepared by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on Ti/Al2O3 (0001) substrates. The shifts of Bragg peaks in high-resolution X-ray diffraction profiles reveal the presence of a homogeneous tensile strain in the out-of-plane direction. This strain is inversely proportional to the average nanowire radius and results from the surface stress acting on the nanowire sidewalls. The superposition of strain from nanowires with different radii in the same ensemble results in a broadening of the Bragg peaks that mimics an inhomogeneous strain on a macroscopic scale. The nanowire ensembles show a small blueshift of the bound-exciton transitions in photoluminescence spectra, reflecting the existence of a compensating in-plane compressive strain, as further supported by grazing incidence X-ray diffraction measurements carried out at a synchrotron. By combining X-ray diffraction and photoluminescence spectroscopy, the surface stress components f(x) and f(z) of the air-exposed GaN{1 (1) over bar 00} planes that constitute the nanowire sidewalls are determined experimentally to be 2.25 and -0.7 N/m, respectively. (C) 2020 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.