What Vermont spends, where it goes, and what it costs you

The $9.38 billion figure is the appropriation "net of duplication" from the Legislature's Joint Fiscal Office. Vermont's budget passes some money through more than one agency — most of it Medicaid moving from the Agency of Human Services to the departments that spend it — so the raw total of $11.94 billion counts about $2.56 billion twice. The net figure is the honest one.

The per-second rate is arithmetic: the appropriation divided by the seconds in the year. Real spending is lumpy, not smooth. Money moves in payroll runs, grant disbursements and contract payments, so on any given day the true figure runs ahead of or behind this line.

The bar chart underneath shows what Vermont actually paid out, quarter by quarter, from the state's own vendor payment records. Those totals are consistently lower than the budget — $8.06 billion against a $9.10 billion appropriation last year — because that dataset does not include state payroll. We show both rather than picking whichever one makes a better headline.

Taxes & fees combines Vermont's education property tax, municipal property tax, personal income tax, sales and use tax, meals and rooms tax, motor vehicle purchase and use tax, motor fuel tax, property transfer tax, and the state's own reported total for fees, licenses, fines and permits. Corporate income tax is charted separately below, because it is not a payment households make directly.

It does not include federal taxes, local school district fees, water and sewer charges, or town clerk fees. Municipal property tax is reported on a calendar basis rather than a budget-year basis and before the income-sensitivity credit is applied, so the level is somewhat overstated even though the trend is sound. The jump between 2020 and 2021 is partly a timing artifact: the April 2020 income tax filing deadline was pushed to July, moving roughly $250 million from one budget year into the next.

Consumer prices is the federal New England regional index. It is weighted toward the Boston metro area, so it likely understates costs that hit Vermont harder — home heating oil, propane, and driving distances. October 2025 is missing from the federal data because of a collection gap, which is why that line has a small break.

Wages is the average weekly wage for Vermont jobs covered by unemployment insurance, smoothed across four quarters because year-end bonus pay makes the raw figure swing wildly. Home value is Zillow's typical-home measure for Vermont.

Each line ends where its data ends: wages through the end of 2025, taxes through the budget year ending June 2025, prices through July 2026. The gap at the right edge is a reporting lag, not a trend.

It would be reasonable to suspect that a wages-only figure overstates how well Vermonters are doing, or understates it. We checked. The federal per-capita personal income measure — which does include dividends, interest, rent and government payments — grew 31.7% between 2019 and 2024. The wage measure grew 32.0%. Two very different yardsticks landed within half a point of each other, so the wage line on the chart above is a fair guide to the trend.

What it does change is the picture of where Vermont money originates. The state's unusual feature is not investment wealth: dividends, interest and rent make up 21.2% of income here versus 20.4% nationally, barely a difference. The gap is in government payments, and within those it is Social Security (7.81% against a national 5.82%) and Medicaid (4.69% against 3.77%). That is Vermont's age structure showing up in the ledger.

One more figure that deserves its own story: income earned by Vermont farm proprietors fell 53% between 2019 and 2025, from $169 million to $79 million.

These are budgeted amounts for the year that began July 1, 2026, taken line by line from the Legislature's budget report and the state Treasurer's actuarial reports. They are not records of money already spent.

Two of the largest items do not appear anywhere in the budget bill. State employee pensions and state retiree health care are recovered as a surcharge on departmental payroll rather than as their own appropriation. Any accounting built only from budget lines silently omits about $259 million. We pulled those from the Treasurer's actuarial valuations instead.

"State employee pay" uses Vermont's personal services budget category, which folds in contracted services alongside salaries. It is not a payroll figure and we have not labeled it as one.

One discrepancy readers should know about: the Administration publishes pension funded ratios of 74.9% and 65.9%, while the independent actuarial valuations put them at 73.2% and 63.4%. We used the actuarial valuations. Debt service is a projection from the Treasurer's capital debt advisory committee, not an enacted budget line.

The famous version of this calculation, Tax Freedom Day, divided all taxes by all income and produced a single national date. Its publisher stopped issuing it in 2019. The reason is a fair criticism: an average is pulled upward by high earners, so the resulting date overstates the burden for roughly four out of five households. Showing each fifth of the income distribution separately avoids that problem, and the spread turns out to be more interesting than any single number.

The federal rates come from the Congressional Budget Office and include not just income tax but payroll, corporate and excise taxes — which is why even the lowest-earning fifth has a date at all. The state and local rates come from an analysis of Vermont's tax system by income level.

One honest limitation. The two sources measure income slightly differently and cover different years. Adding them together is a reasonable approximation, not an exact accounting, and the dates should be read as within a week or so rather than to the day.

Separately, you may see Vermont's tax burden cited as 13.6% of income, fourth-highest in the nation. That is a different calculation that reassigns taxes paid by tourists and out-of-state property owners. It measures something real but it is not comparable to the rates shown here, and the two should not be mixed.