Virginia and New Mexico get back the most per capita; New Jersey and Massachusetts pay in the most net, per the Rockefeller Institute's FFY2023 balance-of-payments estimates

Summary

In the most recent complete federal fiscal year (2023), the average state received about $5,344 more per resident in federal spending than it paid in allocable federal taxes — the whole country ran a net-recipient position that year mainly because pandemic-era outlays were still working through the pipeline. But the state-by-state spread is enormous. Virginia (+$16,650 per person) and New Mexico (+$16,178) received the most back relative to what their residents paid, driven by federal contracting/defense (Virginia) and federal employment plus tribal/health funding (New Mexico). At the other end, New Jersey (-$2,011 per person) and Massachusetts (-$967) were the only two states with a firmly negative balance in 2023 — high-income, high-tax-receipt states that got back noticeably less than their residents sent to Washington. Only 19 states nationally were net payers into the federal system that year; the rest, plus DC, were net recipients.

Where this number comes from, and why it is genuinely hard to compute

A true 'balance of payments' needs two things at state grain: (1) all federal receipts attributable to a state's residents and businesses — individual income tax, payroll/FICA, corporate income tax, excise and estate taxes — and (2) all federal spending that lands in that state — direct payments (Social Security, Medicare, SNAP), grants to state/local governments, procurement contracts, and federal salaries. Both sides require allocation judgment calls (e.g., where does a multistate corporation's tax liability 'belong'; where does federal spending on national parks or the military 'land'), which is why the two major published estimates for very similar years actually disagree noticeably (see caveat below).

The authoritative, methodologically transparent source for this is the Rockefeller Institute of Government's annual 'Balance of Payments' report (produced with the NY State Division of Budget), which has run this calculation consistently since FFY2015 using IRS receipts data and federal outlay data reconciled against BEA and Treasury totals. Its FFY2023 estimates are what the dashboard above is built from (Table 11, per-capita balance).

Full FFY2023 net position by state ($ per capita)

Note DC is excluded from this table (Rockefeller's report treats it separately as a federal-employment-heavy city-state, not a comparable unit).

Cross-check against a second independent source (USAFacts, FFY2024)

USAFacts, drawing on the same two underlying source types (IRS and USASpending.gov) but for FY2024 and with its own allocation method, finds a broadly similar shape but different specific rankings: it names Virginia (+$89.0B total), Alabama (+$44.7B), South Carolina (+$38.9B) as the largest total-dollar net recipients and California (-$275.6B), New York (-$76.5B), Texas (-$68.1B) as the largest total-dollar net contributors — but on a per-capita basis it names Nebraska (-$9,531), Minnesota (-$8,702), Washington State (-$7,139) as the top per-capita net contributors, which does not match Rockefeller's near-zero 2023 estimates for those same three states.

This divergence is real and worth naming rather than papering over: it comes from how each source attributes corporate tax liability to a state. Nebraska (Berkshire Hathaway) and Minnesota host disproportionate corporate tax filings relative to their population, so a methodology that credits corporate tax to the filing state (closer to USAFacts' approach) makes them look like huge net payers, while a methodology that spreads corporate incidence more broadly across shareholders/consumers nationally (closer to Rockefeller's) does not. Virginia leading the recipient side and California/New York/Texas being large gross donors is consistent across both sources — that part of the answer is robust; the exact ranking of mid-pack "donor" states by per-capita magnitude is not.

What this AskAmerica connector could and could not compute on its own

This corpus (fiscal.federal_spending_vs_income_tax_by_state_year) explicitly documents that it cannot answer this question directly: it only carries total USAspending obligations against individual income tax alone, missing payroll/FICA, corporate, and excise tax. Running that naive subtraction for FFY2023 in this connector required filtering out 5 rows with a null soi_income_tax_thousands value — American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands (all territories, not states, that IRS SOI does not publish individual income-tax figures for; no actual state was dropped). Over the remaining 51 units (50 states + DC), the naive subtraction shows every single one as a net recipient — including New York (+$70B), New Jersey (+$6.4B), Massachusetts (+$26B), and Washington (+$21B), all of which are known net payers or near break-even in the rigorous multi-tax-type estimate above. This is exactly the distortion the table's own documentation warns about: omitting payroll and corporate tax overstates every state's apparent net position, and it is worst for high-income, corporate-tax-heavy states, which is why the connector's own naive number gets New Jersey and Massachusetts backwards. The externally-sourced Rockefeller/USAFacts figures above, not this connector's own join, are the basis for the headline numbers in this report.

Every query behind this report

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

SELECT state_abbr, state_name, federal_obligations_usd, soi_income_tax_thousands*1000 AS soi_income_tax_usd, federal_obligations_usd - soi_income_tax_thousands*1000 AS naive_net FROM fiscal.federal_spending_vs_income_tax_by_state_year WHERE "year"='2023' AND soi_income_tax_thousands IS NOT NULL ORDER BY naive_net DESC LIMIT 60

SELECT state_abbr, state_name FROM fiscal.federal_spending_vs_income_tax_by_state_year WHERE "year"='2023' AND soi_income_tax_thousands IS NULL ORDER BY state_abbr