Federal PILT payments to counties: $733M in FY2026, averaging $2.87 per resident in receiving counties — but hugely skewed toward low-population, land-heavy counties

Summary

The federal government compensates counties for federal land within their borders through the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program, administered by the Department of the Interior under 31 U.S.C. Chapter 69. In FY2026 (disbursed June 23, 2026), DOI paid out $733,041,949 to more than 1,900 counties and equivalent local governments across 49 states (all but Rhode Island), DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. This is not rent or a lease fee — it is a formula-based payment tied to acres of qualifying federal land, county population, and prior-year federal revenue-sharing payments, meant to offset the property-tax base that tax-exempt federal land removes. Since the program began in 1977, DOI has distributed $13.4 billion total.

Nationally, averaged over the ~245.6 million residents of the 2,013 counties this corpus could match to population data, PILT works out to about $2.87 per resident (about $2.19 if spread over the entire US population of 335.6 million, since most residents live in counties with little or no federal land and receive far less). That average hides the real story: individual per-capita payments range from a few cents to over $1,500 per resident in a handful of tiny, land-heavy counties.

The actual formula DOI uses

Per DOI's own published FAQ, Interior computes each county's core (Section 6902) PILT payment as the greater of:

• (A) $3.55 (2026 dollars) × qualified federal acres in the county, minus certain prior-year federal land revenue-sharing payments the county already received (e.g. Secure Rural Schools, mineral leasing revenue), or
• (B) $0.51 (2026 dollars) × qualified federal acres, with no such deduction.

Both alternatives are then capped by a population ceiling — a dollar-per-resident limit set in the statute and adjusted annually for inflation — which is exactly why the highest-dollar counties in the data (below) cluster near a common ceiling rather than scaling purely with acreage. Separate formulas (Sections 6904/6905) apply to land acquired for National Forest wilderness, the National Park System, Redwood National Park, and the Lake Tahoe Basin. DOI notes FY2026 payments came in above FY2025 mainly because the Secure Rural Schools program was not reauthorized for FY2025, reducing the prior-year deduction subtracted from FY2026's calculation.

Highest-dollar counties: bumping the population ceiling

The top 10 counties by total dollar amount in FY2026 (Yuma Co. AZ, Mohave Co. AZ, Natrona Co. WY, Clark Co. NV, Kenai Peninsula Borough AK, Washoe Co. NV, Eddy Co. NM, Pima Co. AZ, Otero Co. NM, Gila Co. AZ) all cluster tightly between about $4.70M and $4.77M — large-population, large-federal-acreage counties bumping against the same statutory population ceiling, not simply the counties with "the most" federal land (Elko Co., NV and Nye Co., NV, for example, both hold well over 7M federal acres but receive somewhat less, since their population ceiling binds lower).

Per-resident payments: a very different ranking

Because PILT is paid per county rather than per resident, the counties that gain the most on a per-capita basis are the opposite of the highest-dollar counties: tiny-population counties with substantial federal acreage relative to their population, where the ceiling rarely binds. Kenedy County, TX (population 52 — one of the least populous counties in the US) tops the list at roughly $1,515 per resident from a modest $78,769 total payment. The rest of the top 10 (Yakutat, AK; Petroleum Co., MT; Garfield Co., MT; Daggett Co., UT; Harding Co., SD; Mineral Co., CO; Eureka Co., NV; San Juan Co., CO; Lincoln Co., ID) all sit in the $250-$325 per-resident range — again driven by population sizes in the hundreds to low thousands, not by unusually large dollar payments.

By contrast, most of the ~3,235 counties/county-equivalents in the US receive far less than $10 per resident, or nothing at all — PILT payments reached county_fips-matched entities in about 2,016 of them in FY2026 (roughly 62%), and even fewer receive a payment large enough to be noticeable per capita once divided across a sizeable population.

Trend and cross-validation

This corpus's own FY2026 total, computed independently from lands.pilt_county_payments, is $733,041,949 — matching DOI's own June 23, 2026 press release and national summary exactly. FY2025's total in the same table ($644,769,260) likewise matches DOI's June 24, 2025 press release figure of $644.8 million, and NACo's advocacy history independently corroborates the full year-by-year funding series back to 2013 ($399M) and the current push to make PILT mandatory rather than annually appropriated — counties are told FY2026 will be their last fully funded disbursement unless Congress acts.

Data notes and caveats

• Vintage gap: the per-capita figures pair FY2026 PILT payments (a fiscal year that ended Sept 2026) against 2023 American Community Survey county population — the most recent county-level population this corpus has loaded (ACS publishes on a ~2-year lag). County populations have not stayed static since 2023, so per-capita figures are a close approximation, not an exact same-year computation.
• Geographic coverage gap: about 7% of national PILT dollars go to areas without a standard county FIPS code — New England towns/plantations below the county level, independent cities, and territory-wide rows for DC/Guam/Puerto Rico/the Virgin Islands. These are included in the $733.0M national total but excluded from the per-capita county rankings above (which required a county_fips match to ACS population), so the $705.3M / 2,013-county per-capita base is slightly narrower than the full national total.
• Funding is discretionary, not guaranteed: per NACo, PILT has historically been subject to annual appropriations (with periods of full mandatory funding, e.g. FY2008-2012, FY2013-2014, and recent years). If Congress does not act, payments could be prorated below the formula amount in a future year — the figures above reflect a fully funded year.

Every query behind this report

1 warehouse call ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT fiscal_year, SUM(payment_dollars) AS total FROM lands.pilt_county_payments WHERE fiscal_year = 2026 GROUP BY fiscal_year