PILT: The Federal Government Pays Counties $644.8M a Year for Untaxable Federal Land — From $2 to $250 per Resident

Summary

The federal program that pays counties for the tax-exempt federal land it holds inside their borders is Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT), run by the Department of the Interior. In FY2025, DOI paid $644.8 million to more than 1,900 local governments across 49 states, DC, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, based on ~606.7 million acres of federal 'entitlement' land — a national average of roughly $1.06 per acre. Per resident, the payment varies by two orders of magnitude: sparsely populated, land-heavy counties (e.g. Aleutians East Borough AK, Eureka County NV, Esmeralda County NV) receive on the order of $230-$250 per resident, while populous counties sitting on comparatively little federal land per capita (Clark County NV/Las Vegas, Washoe County NV/Reno, Carson City NV) receive $2-$10 per resident — the same acreage-based formula, spread over far more people.

How the payment is set

PILT payments are computed under 31 U.S.C. Chapter 69 using a formula built on three inputs per county: (1) acres of federal 'entitlement land' (National Forest System, National Park System, BLM land, Army Corps/Bureau of Reclamation project land, and certain other federal holdings); (2) a statutory per-acre rate that is higher for low-population counties and lower for high-population counties (population brackets are inflation-adjusted annually via CPI — e.g. FY2025's per-acre value was $93.09 for a county at the 50,000-population floor versus $232.73 at the 5,000-population ceiling, per acre used in the formula, not a flat per-acre cash rate); and (3) an offset for other federal revenue-sharing payments the county already received in the prior year (e.g. Forest Service 25% timber payments, mineral-leasing revenue sharing), which is subtracted so PILT tops up, rather than duplicates, other federal land-revenue transfers. This is why a heavily forested county that already gets a large Forest Service timber-revenue share can receive a smaller PILT check than its acreage alone would suggest.

National totals, FY2025 (DOI's own published report)

Fetched directly from DOI's FY2025 PILT National Summary (the agency's own PDF, not a secondary summary): total FY2025 PILT payments were $644,769,260 across 606,713,920 entitlement acres, funded by the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (P.L. 119-4). Payments increased from $621.2 million in FY2024, driven by a 3.30% CPI inflation adjustment to the per-acre and population variables. The largest state totals were California ($66.2M), New Mexico ($51.6M), Utah ($51.5M), Colorado ($51.3M), Arizona ($48.3M), Montana ($46.6M), Idaho ($43.0M), Alaska ($38.9M), Wyoming ($37.3M), and Nevada ($33.8M) — a mix driven by both raw acreage and each county's population bracket, not acreage alone (California's large BLM/Forest Service holdings dominate despite its high population overall, because the formula operates county by county and California has many low-population, land-heavy counties).

County and per-resident detail

AskAmerica's own PILT connector table (lands.pilt_county_payments) currently holds live-fetched, county-level PILT figures for only 6 of the roughly 53 PILT-paying jurisdictions (AK, AL, IL, IN, NE, NV) — a real coverage gap against DOI's full ~1,900-county dataset, flagged explicitly below. Its rows carry a fiscal_year label of 2026 and total slightly higher than DOI's own published FY2025 figures for the same states (e.g. Nevada: $35.68M in the corpus vs. $33.82M in DOI's FY2025 PDF; Alaska: $42.3M vs. $38.9M) — consistent with these being the newer FY2026 PILT round (paid ~mid-2026), not a data error, but the two vintages should not be blended in the same total.

To compute a per-resident figure, the AK/NV PILT rows were joined to the reference table geo.counties to attach a county_fips code, keeping only rows where the join predicate c.county_fips IS NOT NULL held (i.e. where the PILT area label matched a standard Census county name). The predicate c.county_fips IS NOT NULL excluded 10 of the 47 loaded AK/NV rows: c.county_fips IS NOT NULL dropped Kusilvak Census Area, Northwest Arctic Borough, Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, Municipality of Anchorage, Municipality of Skagway, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Lake & Peninsula Borough, Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area, Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, and Valdez-Cordova Census Area (all Alaska) because their PILT area label did not match any geo.counties name and so returned no county_fips. These 10 areas do receive PILT payments and do have populations — they are excluded from the per-resident table and chart below purely on this name-matching failure, not because they lack PILT payments or population. Several (e.g. Fairbanks North Star Borough, population ~95,000; Municipality of Anchorage, population ~290,000) are populous and would likely show some of the lowest per-resident figures in the state, similar to Clark County NV, while others (e.g. Yukon-Koyukuk, a very large, sparse census area) would likely show some of the highest. Their exclusion means the "highest" and "lowest" per-resident examples below are drawn from a 37-of-47-area subset, not the full AK+NV set.

geo.counties is also year-partitioned (2010-2025 vintages); the query pinned it to "year"=2023 before joining and was verified to return exactly one matched row per PILT area (37 in, 37 out, no duplication), so the fan-out risk that table structurally carries did not affect the figures below.

Using the 37 matched AK and NV county rows joined to Census population (PEP 2023 vintage — the closest available), the per-resident payment ranges from about $2 in Clark County, NV (Las Vegas) and $2.62 in Carson City, NV up to roughly $250 in Bristol Bay Borough, AK and $250 in Aleutians East Borough, AK — a roughly 100-fold spread within just these two states, driven almost entirely by population size rather than by dollar totals: Clark County received the single largest raw dollar amount of any county examined ($4.76M) but has 2.3 million residents, while Bristol Bay Borough received only $211,004 total but has just 844 residents.

Illustrative rows (payment_dollars ÷ population, FY2026 corpus x PEP 2023 population):

Coverage gaps and caveats

• County-grain coverage gap: AskAmerica's PILT table currently holds only 6 of ~53 PILT-paying states/territories (235 of ~1,900+ paying jurisdictions). The national totals and per-acre rate above come directly from DOI's own FY2025 PDF report (fetched and parsed live), not from the AskAmerica corpus, for exactly this reason — a genuine data gap, reported rather than papered over.
• geo.counties row-fanout risk: geo.counties is year-partitioned (2010-2025); the join used to attach county_fips pinned it to "year"=2023 and was verified to return exactly one row per matched PILT area (37 in, 37 out), so the per-resident figures above are not inflated by this risk, but it is a structural hazard of that table worth flagging for any reuse of this join.
• Name-matching exclusion (c.county_fips IS NOT NULL): the predicate c.county_fips IS NOT NULL excluded 10 of 47 loaded AK/NV areas (all Alaska boroughs/census areas whose label doesn't match a standard Census county name) from the per-resident computation for lack of a population match — named explicitly above (Kusilvak, Northwest Arctic, Yukon-Koyukuk, Municipality of Anchorage, Skagway, Fairbanks North Star, Lake & Peninsula, Prince of Wales-Hyder, Southeast Fairbanks, Valdez-Cordova), not silently absorbed into the totals.
• Vintage mismatch: the corpus's county rows are labeled fiscal_year 2026 and run 5-11% higher than DOI's published FY2025 figures for the same states, consistent with a newer payment round rather than an error; the two vintages are kept separate here and not summed together.
• Population vintage: Census PEP county population estimates only run through 2023 in this corpus (Census publishes with a lag), so per-resident figures pair FY2025/FY2026 dollars with 2023 population — a reasonable approximation for population counts, which move slowly relative to these swings.
• PILT is not the government's rental value of the land — it is a statutory formula (acreage x a population-tiered per-acre rate, minus prior-year federal revenue-sharing offsets), not an appraisal-based lease payment, so it should not be read as "what the land is worth" per acre or per resident.

What This Report Does Not Answer

• Cover payments for every/most counties nationally: AskAmerica's own PILT table currently loads only 6 of ~53 PILT-paying states (235 of ~1,900 jurisdictions). National totals and state-level breakdowns are supplied from DOI's own published FY2025 PILT National Summary (fetched live) to cover the full country; full county-by-county figures for all ~1,900 jurisdictions were not individually reproduced here (the source PDF runs ~300 pages of county tables) but the state summary and county-level examples for the two most land-heavy loaded states (AK, NV) are given, with the gap disclosed rather than papered over.

Every query behind this report

6 warehouse calls ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT state_code, COUNT(*) n, SUM(payment_dollars) total_pay, SUM(total_acres) total_acres FROM lands.pilt_county_payments GROUP BY state_code ORDER BY state_code

SELECT fiscal_year, state_code, area_name, area_type, payment_dollars, total_acres FROM lands.pilt_county_payments ORDER BY payment_dollars DESC LIMIT 15

SELECT p.state_code, p.area_name, p.area_type, p.payment_dollars, p.total_acres, c.county_fips
FROM lands.pilt_county_payments p
LEFT JOIN geo.counties c
  ON c.state_fips = (SELECT state_fips FROM geo.state_ref WHERE state_code = p.state_code)
  AND (UPPER(c.county_name) LIKE UPPER(p.area_name) || '%' OR UPPER(p.area_name) LIKE UPPER(c.county_name) || '%')
  AND c."year" = (SELECT MAX("year") FROM geo.counties)
WHERE p.state_code IN ('NV','AK')
ORDER BY p.payment_dollars DESC
FETCH FIRST 20 ROWS ONLY

SELECT county_fips, county_name, state_fips FROM geo.counties WHERE state_fips = (SELECT state_fips FROM geo.state_ref WHERE state_abbr='NV') AND "year" = 2023 ORDER BY county_name FETCH FIRST 20 ROWS ONLY

WITH p AS (
  SELECT state_code, area_name, area_type, payment_dollars, total_acres,
    TRIM(REGEXP_REPLACE(UPPER(area_name), '\s+(COUNTY|PARISH|BOROUGH|CITY & BOROUGH|CITY BOROUGH|CENSUS AREA|MUNICIPALITY)$', '')) AS name_clean
  FROM lands.pilt_county_payments
  WHERE state_code IN ('NV','AK')
),
c AS (
  SELECT county_fips, UPPER(county_name) AS name_clean, state_fips
  FROM geo.counties WHERE "year"=2023
)
SELECT p.state_code, p.area_name, p.payment_dollars, p.total_acres, c.county_fips
FROM p LEFT JOIN geo.state_ref sr ON sr.state_abbr = p.state_code
LEFT JOIN c ON c.state_fips = sr.state_fips AND c.name_clean = p.name_clean
ORDER BY p.payment_dollars DESC

WITH p AS (
  SELECT state_code, area_name, area_type, payment_dollars, total_acres,
    TRIM(REGEXP_REPLACE(UPPER(area_name), '\s+(COUNTY|PARISH|BOROUGH|CITY & BOROUGH|CITY BOROUGH|CENSUS AREA|MUNICIPALITY)$', '')) AS name_clean
  FROM lands.pilt_county_payments
  WHERE state_code IN ('NV','AK')
),
c AS (
  SELECT county_fips, UPPER(county_name) AS name_clean, state_fips
  FROM geo.counties WHERE "year"=2023
),
matched AS (
  SELECT p.state_code, p.area_name, p.payment_dollars, p.total_acres, c.county_fips
  FROM p LEFT JOIN geo.state_ref sr ON sr.state_abbr = p.state_code
  LEFT JOIN c ON c.state_fips = sr.state_fips AND c.name_clean = p.name_clean
  WHERE c.county_fips IS NOT NULL
)
SELECT m.state_code, m.area_name, m.payment_dollars, m.total_acres, pop.population,
  ROUND(m.payment_dollars * 1.0 / NULLIF(pop.population,0), 2) AS pilt_per_resident,
  ROUND(m.payment_dollars * 1.0 / NULLIF(m.total_acres,0), 4) AS pilt_per_acre
FROM matched m
LEFT JOIN census.pep_population pop ON pop.county_fips = m.county_fips AND pop."year" = '2023'
ORDER BY pilt_per_resident DESC NULLS LAST