U.S. State and Local Tax Rates, 1975 - 2022

We develop a dataset of state (1977–2022) and local (2000–2022) tax rates from personal income, corporate income, property, sales, and excise taxes. We utilize sources such as NBER TaxSim, Tax Foundation, CCH CorpSystem, state and local level tax authority websites (typically the department of revenue or equivalent body), as well as data from other research. For each state and local tax type, we collect annual data going back in time as far possible. Local jurisdictions include everything from city and county governments to overlapping taxing geographies defined by local school boundaries, water and fire districts, or even specially constructed business tax districts. We aggregate local tax rates to the county level as this represents a stable and well-defined geographic mapping that is non-overlapping and corresponds well to other available measures of governmental oversight and economic activity. Update August 2025: the state-level property tax rates reported in V1 were not effective percent tax rates as reported in the published version of our paper. V2 contains the correctly scaled rates.