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Which Places Benefit Most From State and Local Tax Deductions?

2 min readBy: Alan Cole

One of the most substantial changes in President Trump’s most recent taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. plan is the elimination of many itemized deductions, including those for state and local taxes. This map shows the variation, by county, in the amounts of these deductions. The measurement used here is mean deduction amount taken per return: in other words, the total of all of the deductions for state and local taxes, divided by number of returns filed. The results show that the benefits of these deductions vary substantially from county to county.

This map is interactive—hover the mouse over a given county to find out its average amount of state and local deduction claimed. Click here for a larger version.

There are two factors contributing to this regional variation. The first is that higher-income taxpayers tend to take larger deductions. People with very high incomes tend to have very high levels of sub-federal taxes paid, and furthermore, they’re more likely to itemize generally. Lower-income taxpayers tend to opt for the standard deductionThe standard deduction reduces a taxpayer’s taxable income by a set amount determined by the government. It was nearly doubled for all classes of filers by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as an incentive for taxpayers not to itemize deductions when filing their federal income taxes. instead. Consequently, the itemized deductionItemized deductions allow individuals to subtract designated expenses from their taxable income and can be claimed in lieu of the standard deduction. Itemized deductions include those for state and local taxes, charitable contributions, and mortgage interest. An estimated 13.7 percent of filers itemized in 2019, most being high-income taxpayers. s in this map are most valuable in counties where incomes are high.

The second factor for county-by-county variation is that state and local tax regimes differ substantially. The places that benefit most from this federal deduction tend to have high state and local taxes overall. The border becomes clearly noticeable between California and Nevada, for example, simply by looking at data from federal tax returns. The ten counties benefiting most from these deductions are all located in four states—ones that, like California, are known to have high tax burdens generally:

Top Ten Counties for State and Local Deductions (2014)
Source: IRS SOI Tax Stats – County Data

New York County, NY

$24,898

Marin County, CA

$16,956

San Mateo County, CA

$15,405

Westchester County, NY

$14,784

Fairfield County, CT

$14,262

Santa Clara County, CA

$12,562

San Francisco County, CA

$12,116

Nassau County, NY

$11,624

Morris County, NJ

$11,440

Somerset County, NJ

$11,267

It is unclear which kinds of taxpayers would see their tax bills increase or decrease as a result of the president’s plan. There are many tax cuts in the plan, some of them for the same kind of wealthy filers these deductions typically benefit. However, it is clear that the distribution of this particular tax change would vary with geography.

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