2018 Combined Statistical Areas by Total Federal Income Tax Liability, 2018
 

Source: irs.gov

The IRS data page is being weird. In past years I could look up each MSA in their spreadsheet but for 2018, every California MSA and the Boston MSA are completely omitted and the Baltimore MSA is severly underreported(by like 10 billion dollars!) so I decided to go through the county data for each state and then I manually added up CSA totals.

For now I will stop at around 5 million+ population. Philly and Atlanta coming up.

2018 CSAs by Total Federal Income Tax Liability, 2018
$199.5 Billion New York-Newark CSA
$108.4 Billion San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA
$101.5 Billion Los Angeles-Long Beach CSA
$66.4 Billion Washington-Baltimore-Arlington CSA
$63.8 Billion Boston-Worcester-Providence CSA
$62.2 Billion Chicago-Naperville CSA
$47.3 Billion Miami-Port St Lucie-Fort Lauderdale CSA
$40.9 Billion Dallas-Fort Worth CSA
$37.7 Billion Houston-The Woodlands CSA
$36.9 Billion Seattle-Tacoma CSA
$20.4 Billion Phoenix-Mesa CSA

Yeah, Philly will definitely be Top 10.

And I wouldn't expect the Bay Area to pay more in federal taxes than LA. Impressive.

Seems about right for Phoenix. Seattle tends to jump us in economic rankings despite our slightly higher population ranking. Would be interested to see Detroit as well.

Yeah Philadelphia is in the top 10, I just finished the 3 million+ areas and some of the other large areas in states I already covered and I added NYC

2018 CSAs by Total Federal Income Tax Liability, 2018
$199.5 Billion New York-Newark CSA
$108.4 Billion San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA
$101.5 Billion Los Angeles-Long Beach CSA
$74.0 Billion New York City
$66.4 Billion Washington-Baltimore-Arlington CSA
$63.8 Billion Boston-Worcester-Providence CSA
$62.2 Billion Chicago-Naperville CSA
$47.3 Billion Miami-Port St Lucie-Fort Lauderdale CSA
$40.9 Billion Dallas-Fort Worth CSA
$40.7 Billion Philadelphia-Reading-Camden CSA
$37.7 Billion Houston-The Woodlands CSA
$36.9 Billion Seattle-Tacoma CSA
$31.2 Billion Atlanta-Athens--Clark County-Sandy Springs CSA
$24.7 Billion Detroit-Warren-Ann Arbor CSA
$23.6 Billion Minneapolis-St Paul CSA
$23.1 Billion Denver-Aurora CSA
$20.4 Billion Phoenix-Mesa CSA
$18.8 Billion San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad MSA
$15.6 Billion Portland-Vancouver-Salem CSA
$15.3 Billion Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown MSA
$14.7 Billion Orlando-Lakeland-Deltona CSA
$14.3 Billion Cleveland-Akron-Canton CSA
$13.8 Billion Tampa-St Petersburg-Clearwater MSA
$11.3 Billion Sacramento-Roseville CSA
$9.6 San Antonio-New Braunfels-Pearsall CSA

I was somewhat surprised as well. The main reason imo is that the Inland Empire just being so low in these kinds of stats.

CA MSA by Total Federal Income Tax Liability, 2018
$84.9 Billion Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA(13.2 million population)
$64.5 Billion San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA(4.7 million population)
$32.0 BIllion San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA(1.9 million population)
$11.9 Billion Remainder of Bay Area CSA(2.9 million population)
$11.6 Billion Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA(4.6 million population)
$4.9 Billion Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura MSA(846,000)

I wouldn't have expected to see Boston above Chicago and so close to DC. Are salaries that much lower in Chicago? I didn't think so. Miami punching above its weight here too.

Also, you're not joking about the Inland Empire:

$11.6 Billion Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA (4.6 million population)

Miami doesn't really make sense. It is smaller in population than both Dallas and Houston and it has a smaller median income. Intricacies of tax laws? :shrug: And both states are non-income tax states so its not like hey were deducting state taxes from Federal either.

For Miami, I was initially thinking this had to do with all the second+ homes / investment properties and how deductions for these are now capped at $10k . . . but that would be reflected in the primary residences' filings, not Miami's. :shrug:

I assume capital gains taxes. Miami has low median incomes, but it (probably) has a large number of households paying large capital gains taxes. Think of all the rich people from the Northeast and Latin America domiciled in South Florida at least part-time.

Also, a lot of snowbirds and semi-retired use FL for IRS purposes rather than NY/NJ/CT or wherever as primary residence, even if they are unlikely to meet the six month residency rule, to avoid higher state and local taxes. So they may be showing up with IRS but not with other indicators.

Palm Beach County punches wayyy above it's weight. In 2018 the county had a federal tax liability of $15.6 Billion which came out to over $10K per capita--Miami-Dade was roughly half that at $5800 per capita, combined those 2 counties accounted for $31B

Cost of living between Chicago and Boston are two totally different worlds. Not surprising at all.

I may be brainfarting here, but wouldn't cost of living not factor into federal tax liabilities? If salaries are about the same in metro Boston as they are in Chicagoland (a quick Indeed check says "yes", but these are all just white-collar), then it doesn't matter if housing is cheaper, no? The only things the Fed would care about is state-specific deductions like state/local income, sales, and personal property/real-estate taxes paid.

MA and IL sales taxes are both 6.25%, so that's a wash. MA property taxes average 1.22%, while IL's are 2.31% (among the highest in the country). So that leaves some MA money available to the Feds proportionally above what the Fed can get out of IL. MA's income tax is 5.05%, while IL's income tax is 4.95% - basically another wash, given the population difference between metro Chicago and metro Boston. Maybe the local taxes are a lot higher in IL, allowing for more deductions? No idea.

^ for starters, diamondpark is using CSAs here, and metro boston and chicagoland aren't that different in population at that overly bloated level.

2019 US CSAs:

NYC - 22.6M
LA - 18.7M
Chicago - 9.8M
DC/Balt. - 9.8M
Bay Area - 9.7M
Boston - 8.3M
Dallas - 8.1M
Houston - 7.3M
Philly - 7.2M
Miami - 6.9M



So boston leapfrogging chicago on this metric isn't WAY out of line like the bay area beating out the 2x larger LA juggernaut.

On top of that, I would hazard a guess that chicagoland has a higher proportion of poor and working class people than metro boston (people who pay a lot less in federal taxes than UMC professionals).

So while salaries for a doctor or architect or accountant might not be radically divergent between the two, metro boston is probably not saddled with the fallout from the past half century of rust belt deindustrialization to the same degree that chicagoland is.

I highly doubt regional Boston has the same salaries as Chicagoland.

If so that's a very shitty situation for Boston, paying more in federal taxes on top of it.

Not sure if that's even true... wouldn't be surprised if Boston property values were twice Chicago.

I think the distributions of income are just different enough, with Chicago being much more blue collar than Boston on average.

All the sources I've looked at says Mass averages 1.22%. It's down to the individual municipality, so there's some variance. I see where I grew up in Foxboro currently is 1.45% for residential, super-wealthy Weston is 1.28%, and dumpy Brockton is 1.55%. The City of Boston has a 1.06% residential. Cambridge is a ridiculous 0.575% for 2020.

(On the flip side, the NH portion of the CSA are all paying 2.5%+, even if they aren't paying state income taxes)

However, this still may be a big part of it, good call on the value differences. Since 2018, the most anyone can deduct from their Fed statement for housing is $10k. At the Mass average residential rate, anyone with a house valued over $820k is suddenly paying a lot more to the Fed than they were in 2017 and before. Now I understand why so many people in the Northeast and West Coast were pissed about that $10k deduction cap.

Right, I knew we were comparing CSAs, which was what made me more confused: the entire state of Rhode Island is part of that Boston number, and RI has the (wealth) demographics of a much poorer, blue-collar state than Mass.

Yeah, I guess I underestimated the demo differences. The Indeed salary checker was just for the type of jobs listed on Indeed.

Salaries aren't the same. Median household income in Boston CSA is significantly higher than Chicago CSA. Of course not all income is salaries, but they aren't the same.

It's likely that apples-apples salaries are similar, but that's true almost everywhere. A dentist in Alabama generally isn't making less than a dentist in California. The difference is that CA has far more high earners, not that apples-apples jobs have differing earnings (i.e. proportion of higher salaried jobs in CA are obviously higher in CA).

Chicago doesn't really have a CSA; something like 95% of the Chicagoland population lives in the MSA, the CSA adds some hillbilly towns on the fringes.

To the point of the thread, Boston (or DC or Bay Area for that matter) doesn't have the poor minority population that Chicago has; which is why Chicago punches below it's weight in these types of metrics, especially when compared to Boston, DC, Bay Area who's CSA numbers become significantly bloated compared to MSA population.

I'm not really sure what this means. The D.C. area has one of the largest black populations in the entire country.