Where My Taxes Go

Sources and methods

About the data

Where My Taxes Go publishes public spending figures taken directly from official government sources. Each page names its source, links to it, and gives the date the data was retrieved or published. Figures are computed from the source files by a script. Nothing is typed in by hand, and no estimates are added beyond the tax calculations described below.

Where do my taxes go? calculators

Each calculator takes the latest official table of government spending by function and works out each function's share of the positive spending lines. Your tax, whether estimated from income or typed in, is multiplied by those shares. Lines that are negative in the source (receipts netted against spending, such as US undistributed offsetting receipts) cannot be a share of a tax bill. They are listed under each table and left out of the base.

Tax estimates use the current year's national rates for a single person with income from employment, as described on each calculator. Regional taxes (US state, Canadian provincial, Scottish rates) are not modelled, and nor are most credits and deductions. Enter the tax you actually paid for a more exact result.

Federal money to states, cities and universities

Source. USAspending.gov, the official public record of federal awards, run by the U.S. Department of the Treasury (public domain). We query its API: spending_over_time for yearly totals, spending_by_category for agencies and Assistance Listings (formerly CFDA). The data was retrieved on 2026-10-04.

What the numbers are. Obligations: the amount agencies committed in awards whose action date falls in the fiscal year (October to September). This is not the same as cash paid out (outlays). Five award types are shown: contracts (including orders under indefinite-delivery vehicles), grants (block, formula, project and cooperative agreements), direct payments (to individuals and others, such as Social Security), loans (the subsidy cost the government records, not the face value of the loan), and insurance and other. A negative number is a net de-obligation: more was taken back from earlier awards than was newly awarded.

Medicare is excluded from state and city figures. USAspending records Medicare benefit payments (Assistance Listings 93.770, 93.773 and 93.774: Parts D, A and B) at the place of performance of the Medicare Administrative Contractor that processes the claims, not where beneficiaries live. For example, $87.9 billion of FY2025 Medicare payments is recorded in North Dakota ($109,979 per resident). We fetch those three programs separately for every state and city and subtract them (totals, the Department of Health and Human Services line, and the program list). Each page states the amount removed. University pages are not affected.

What is left out. Federal employee salaries, interest on the debt, tax refunds and spending that agencies do not report as awards. Classified spending is also excluded. Award totals are therefore smaller than total federal outlays.

Fiscal years. FY2018 to FY2025 are complete. FY2026 ended on 30 September 2026 and is shown as preliminary, because agencies keep submitting data after the year ends and Department of Defense contract data is published 90 days late.

States use the place of performance (where the work is done or the money is used). Per-resident figures divide by the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimate for 1 July of the same year (2020 to 2025). The Census estimates do not cover Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands or the US Virgin Islands, so those have no per-resident figure.

Cities are the 100 largest by the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate (Washington, DC is on the states page). We match the place-of-performance city name recorded on each award in that state (USAspending writes 'St.' as 'SAINT'). Hyphenated names are matched with and without the hyphen. Mailing names do not follow city limits exactly, so some suburban addresses may be included and some city addresses left out. Payments to individuals are published by county only, so city pages mostly exclude them. New York City adds these mailing names: NEW YORK, BROOKLYN, BRONX, STATEN ISLAND, QUEENS, LONG ISLAND CITY, ASTORIA, JAMAICA, FLUSHING, FOREST HILLS, ELMHURST, CORONA, JACKSON HEIGHTS, BAYSIDE, FAR ROCKAWAY, RIDGEWOOD, WOODSIDE, QUEENS VILLAGE, FRESH MEADOWS, RICHMOND HILL, OZONE PARK, SOUTH OZONE PARK, KEW GARDENS, REGO PARK, MASPETH, MIDDLE VILLAGE, EAST ELMHURST, WHITESTONE, COLLEGE POINT, HOLLIS, SAINT ALBANS, SPRINGFIELD GARDENS, ROSEDALE, CAMBRIA HEIGHTS, HOWARD BEACH, SUNNYSIDE, LITTLE NECK, DOUGLASTON, OAKLAND GARDENS, GLEN OAKS, ARVERNE, ROCKAWAY PARK. A city is not shown if its FY2025 total was below $1.0 million or negative.

Universities and colleges are built in four steps. (1) Take every USAspending recipient of business type 'higher education' with at least $3 million in obligations over FY2023–FY2025. (2) Keep those that are registered in SAM.gov as a public or private institution of higher education and whose name is a university, college or institute. Drop LLCs that run national laboratories or affiliated labs (for example the operators of Argonne and Oak Ridge, or the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory), state education departments, hospitals and similar bodies. (3) Merge registrations of the same institution: the same words in the registered name (ignoring order and words like 'The', 'Trustees of', 'Inc') at the same city and state. We do not merge by SAM parent, because parents are often a state government or a whole university system. Separately registered campuses therefore stay separate, so UCLA and UC Berkeley each have their own page. University-owned research corporations and foundations that register on their own (for example Georgia Tech Research Corporation) appear as their own entries. (4) Rank by obligations over the last three full years, keep the top 1,000, and publish only those averaging at least $1.0 million a year with a positive FY2025 total. Each page lists the registered names and UEIs it covers. Subawards (money passed on from another recipient) are not included.

US federal budget by year

From the Monthly Treasury Statement, Table 9 (receipts by source and outlays by budget function), via the Treasury's Fiscal Data API, using the September (year-end) statement for each complete year and the latest month for the current year.

US foreign aid

From the ForeignAssistance.gov complete dataset (U.S. Department of State, public domain), version of 02 Sep 2026: obligations and disbursements by recipient country, managing agency, U.S. sector and fiscal year, FY2015–FY2026. Per-person figures use World Bank population estimates (CC BY 4.0). Details and caveats are in the foreign aid method notes.

Updates

Figures are refreshed when new fiscal-year data is published: after year-end for USAspending, each month for the Treasury statement, and when each country releases a new budget or outturn. The date on each page shows the version you are reading.

Independence

This site is not affiliated with any government. It reports the official numbers and links to them so you can check every figure. If a number here differs from the source, the source is right.