Kansas tax revenue, December 2020

For December 2020, total Kansas tax revenue was 1.8 percent greater than last December 2019. Over the six months of the current fiscal year, tax revenue is 16.6 percent higher than at the same point of the previous fiscal year.

Tax reports from the State of Kansas for December 2020 show tax revenues rising from the previous month and also higher than the same month the prior year, despite the effects of the response to the pandemic.

When reporting on Kansas tax collections, the comparison is usually made to the estimated collections. Those estimates were revised in April based on economic conditions affected by the response to the pandemic. To get a feel for the effects of the response to the pandemic, it is best to compare to the same month the prior year.

(The estimated revenue figures are still important because the state budget is based on them. If the actual revenue is much below the estimated revenue, there may not be enough income to pay expenses.)

For December 2020, individual income tax collections were $306,676,400, down 3.0 percent from the prior December. Retail sales tax collections rose by 0.5 percent to $201,939,940. Total tax collections were $770,248,352, up 1.8 percent from the same month the prior year. A nearby table summarizes.

For fiscal year 2021, which started on July 1, 2020, total tax collections are up by 16.6 percent over the same period of the previous fiscal year. A large reason for this is the change in tax deadlines from April to July, shifting much revenue from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2021. That hasn’t always been explained, as I show in In Kansas, explanations for tax collections may vary.

As can be seen in a nearby table, tax revenue for fiscal year 2021 is $595,911,830 greater than at the same time in the previous fiscal year. Of this, $455,601,935, or 76.4 percent, is due to the increase in individual income tax revenue.

Of the $213,493,820 increase in tax collections from November 2020, $94,052,459 was due to quarterly corporate income tax payments, and $70,201,416 was due to insurance premium taxes.

My report on tax revenue for April details some changes made by the estimating group.

My interactive visualization of Kansas tax revenue has been updated with October data. Click here to use it.

An example from the visualization illustrates the composition of Kansas tax revenue for the last year ending in November 2020. Individual income tax accounted for 50.5 percent of revenue, and retail sales tax 31.5 percent. Together, this is 82.0 percent. Add compensating use tax of 7.0 percent and corporate income tax of 5.6 percent, and that is nearly all — 94.6 percent — of Kansas tax revenue.