NoteWorkbooks for 2019–2020 aren’t posted at the usual OSC URL, so those years are missing from the States year list. Methodology
How we count
Good numbers need clear rules. This page explains what The Ledger measures, where the figures come from, and what they don't mean, including why we never blend fiscal years, and why a state's "balance" isn't the same thing as welfare.
The Ledger follows federal money along one path: taxes raised, a budget written into law, dollars spent by agencies, and money returned across the states. Each stage uses its own archived source system. Rankings for states come from a balance-of-payments ledger; Revenue, Congress, and Agencies come from Treasury, IRS, CBO, and USAspending releases. We do not stitch those systems into a single blended total.
Figures are archived locally from .gov releases. Pages do not call live APIs at runtime for the core datasets.
State rankings use New York State Comptroller federal budget balance-of-payments tables, a rare public accounting of what each state pays in and gets back. Available years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Workbooks for 2019–2020 aren't published at the usual OSC URL; 2024–2025 ledgers aren't out yet.
Each year is built only from that year’s OSC workbook (taxes paid, expenditures, population, and category sheets). Derived ranks and returns are computed inside the selected year, never across years.
Primary “federal revenue paid” follows OSC’s taxes-paid allocation: individual income taxes, social insurance (payroll) taxes, corporate income taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, and other federal receipts attributed to the state. Exact allocation rules live in the OSC workbook and accompanying report.
Primary “federal spending received” follows OSC expenditures: direct payments (including Social Security and Medicare), grants (including the federal share of Medicaid), procurement and contracts, federal wages and salaries, and other identified outlays attributed to the state. Spending is not limited to means-tested welfare.
Additional series appear on state pages so you can compare apples-to-oranges sources without confusing the primary ranking:
None of these overlays drive rank, net balance, or return per dollar. Missing same-year supporting files mean the field is omitted for that FFY rather than filled from another year.
National receipt composition comes from the U.S. Treasury Monthly Treasury Statement (MTS Table 9), archived at each fiscal-year end. State-level gross collections for the Revenue “by state” view come from IRS SOI Data Book tables (collection location).
Explore composition, by state, and trends. IRS collection geography is not the same thing as OSC’s taxes-paid allocation used in state rankings.
Budget history and the ten-year baseline come from Congressional Budget Office machine-readable releases (historical budget data and current-law baseline), archived locally. Amounts are typically billions of dollars.
Year drilldowns show CBO’s published categories: revenue sources, discretionary and mandatory outlays, and interest, not program-by-program line items. See historical, baseline, and breakdown.
Two related views sit under Agencies. Awards use USAspending award obligations by awarding agency (contracts, grants, loans, and related awards). Outlays use Treasury MTS Table 5 net outlays by agency and major account, a broader cash picture that includes benefits and other non-award spending.
Obligations are promises to pay; outlays are cash (or cash-equivalent) payments. They are related, but they are not the same thing in the same year.
Absolute dollars answer how much money moved. Per-capita figures answer how large that flow is relative to population. Return per dollar paid answers how much spending a state received for each dollar of federal revenue attributed to it. The site exposes all three; none alone tells a complete story.
When the federal government runs a deficit, aggregate spending nationally exceeds aggregate revenue. OSC’s FFY 2023 tables therefore show more recipient dollars than contributor dollars in total. Deficit financing is included implicitly whenever spending totals exceed revenue totals for the same year.
FFY 2023 still reflects some pandemic-related grants and other temporary flows in OSC’s expenditure categories. Treat a single year as a snapshot.
Federal spending received includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military bases and contracts, federal salaries, disaster relief, infrastructure grants, agriculture supports, and many other categories. A high return per dollar often reflects demographics, federal facilities, or procurement, not a moral judgment about residents or parties.
Income levels affect tax payments. Age structure affects Social Security and Medicare. Military bases, contractors, and federal employment concentrate spending. Disaster declarations, farm supports, and healthcare program enrollment also matter. Party affiliation alone does not explain results.
Each state is classified by which presidential candidate won its electoral votes in the most recent presidential election (currently 2024). Labels use non-color text ("Republican presidential vote" and "Democratic presidential vote") alongside any color cues. Classification is stored separately from financial data so either file can be updated independently.
Published state balance-of-payments analyses differ in year covered, treatment of interest on the debt, allocation of defense spending, treatment of territories, and whether figures adjust for taxpayer residency. Compare definitions before comparing headline rankings, and do not equate IRS collection geography or USAspending awards with OSC’s compiled ledger.
Section hubs may show recent headlines on federal spending, taxes, and money returning to states, gathered from Google News RSS and publisher feeds and tagged to Ledger topics. Headlines are not used in rankings.
Official datasets use shorthand most readers should not have to decode. The Ledger maps those labels to readable titles and short explanations in the definitions library, including discretionary vs mandatory spending, obligations vs outlays, and IRS collections vs OSC ranking totals.
For live pass/fail output on the shipped archives, see Data integrity. That page runs the same validators used when the site loads its archives.