What the State Takes Per Resident
Which state governments collect the least tax per resident?
What this ranking does not measure
This measures state government tax collections only, divided by population. It does not measure what anyone pays, and it does not measure total tax burden. Local taxes — county, municipal, school district — are not in this figure at all, so a state can rank low here while residents face high local property or sales taxes. It is also not a per-person bill: taxes collected from non-residents and from businesses are divided across residents anyway, which is why Alaska ranks first while collecting $740,920 thousand in severance tax, and why Texas ranks fourth on $56,499,029 thousand of sales and gross-receipts tax. Washington, D.C. is a city-state and its 'state' collections include property tax ($2,978,199 thousand) that is levied locally everywhere else — it is not comparable to the 50 states and is shown here only because the file includes it. Nothing here says what residents receive in return: schools, roads, health services and pensions are outside this ranking entirely. Two structural flags need care: New Hampshire is flagged hasIndividualIncomeTax:true and collected $91,186 thousand of individual income tax, and Washington is flagged hasIndividualIncomeTax:true with $545,712 thousand collected while levying no corporate income tax — the flags are binary and do not describe how narrow a tax is. Finally, the no-income-tax states do not simply occupy the low end: Nevada (rank 32) and Wyoming (rank 29) levy neither individual nor corporate income tax and still sit mid-table. Position on this list is a description of one accounting line, not evidence about tax policy's effects, and none of it supports a causal claim.
Highest
- 1Alaska$2,279 per resident - no individual income tax
- 2New Hampshire$2,393 per resident - no state general sales tax
- 3Florida$2,719 per resident - no individual income tax
- 4Texas$2,874 per resident - no individual and no corporate income tax
- 5Missouri$2,883 per resident
- 6South Dakota$2,906 per resident - no individual income tax
- 7Georgia$3,073 per resident
- 8Oklahoma$3,185 per resident
- 9Ohio$3,269 per resident
- 10Colorado$3,401 per resident
Lowest
- 47California$6,975 per resident
- 48New Mexico$7,013 per resident
- 49Hawaii$7,632 per resident
- 50Vermont$8,028 per resident - highest of the 50 states
- 51Washington, D.C.$16,036 per resident - city-state, not comparable
All fifty-one jurisdictions carry this measure; none was excluded.
How it was computed
For each of the 51 jurisdictions, read pillars.formation.indicators.taxPerCapita.display, strip the '$' and commas to a number, and sort ascending — rank 1 is the smallest. No jurisdiction had a null or missing:true on this indicator, so all 51 are ranked. The figure is independently reproducible from the raw fields: fiscal.totalTaxThousands x 1000 / population reproduces every display value to within $0.47 (Alaska: 1,686,939 x 1,000 / 740,133 = $2,279.24 against a display of '$2,279'; D.C.: 11,261,267 x 1,000 / 702,250 = $16,035.98 against '$16,036'). The ordering also matches the file's own taxPerCapita.percentile exactly, which runs 100 (Alaska) down to 0 (D.C.) in steps of 2. Income-tax notes come from fiscal.hasIndividualIncomeTax and fiscal.hasCorporateIncomeTax; the 'no state general sales tax' note for New Hampshire comes from its fiscal.noTaxItems. Dollar levies quoted in the caveat come from fiscal.levies (T40 individual income, T41 corporate, T53 severance), stated in thousands. Source given in the file: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Tax Collections. Reference points computed the same way: median $4,244, mean $4,739.27; D.C. is 7.04x Alaska, and the highest state, Vermont, is 3.52x Alaska.