The VT State Spend-O-Meter counts $297 a second — and measures it against what Vermonters earn and what they pay.

Vermont state government will spend $9,381,460,606 in the budget year that began July 1. Divided across the year, that comes to about $297 every second, $25.7 million a day, and $14,489 for every person living in the state.

FYIVT is publishing those numbers as a live counter. The VT State Spend-O-Meter, launching today, tracks the state budget in real time, follows the money to its destination, and sets it against three things Vermonters can measure for themselves: what they earn, what things cost, and what they hand back in taxes and fees.

The spending figure comes from Act 144, the budget bill Gov. Phil Scott signed on June 16. It is the appropriation net of duplication — the total after removing roughly $2.56 billion that Vermont's accounting counts twice as money passes between agencies, mostly Medicaid moving from the Agency of Human Services to the departments that spend it. The gross figure is $11.94 billion.

Taxes outpaced wages; wages outpaced prices

The tool's central chart puts four measures on one scale, indexed to 2019.

Between the budget years ending in 2019 and 2025, what Vermonters paid in state and local taxes and fees rose 40.7 percent. That combines the education and municipal property taxes with the income, sales, meals and rooms, motor vehicle, fuel and property transfer taxes, plus the state's own reported total for fees, licenses, fines and permits.

Over the same period, the average weekly wage for Vermont jobs rose 36 percent, according to the federal Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Consumer prices in New England rose 22 percent. Typical Vermont home values rose 50 percent.

The ordering is the finding: taxes and fees grew faster than wages, and wages grew faster than measured inflation. Vermont wage growth also ran ahead of the national figure of 31.3 percent.

Two caveats belong with those numbers. There is no official Vermont inflation rate — the federal government publishes no consumer price index for any individual state, so the New England regional index stands in, and it is weighted toward the Boston metro area. And consumer price indexes do not include taxes of any kind. Not property tax, not income tax, not sales tax, not a registration renewal. The tax line on the chart measures something the inflation line, by construction, cannot.

Vermont's corporate income tax appears on a separate chart because it more than doubled over the period, though it fell back sharply in the most recent year. Who ultimately bears a state corporate tax — shareholders, workers or customers — is unsettled among economists, and the tool says so.

A fifth of Vermont income is a government payment

Wages tell less of the story in Vermont than in most states. Wages and salaries account for 44.6 percent of Vermont personal income, about five points below the national share, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis figures. Nearly a third of Vermont jobs — 135,731 of 444,869 — fall outside the wage statistics entirely, most of them self-employed.

Government transfer payments now make up 21.6 percent of all personal income in Vermont, against 19 percent nationally, and they have grown 51.2 percent since 2019 while wages grew 34.2 percent. The gap is not investment wealth: dividends, interest and rent are 21.2 percent of Vermont income versus 20.4 percent nationally. It is Social Security, at 7.81 percent of income against a national 5.82 percent, and Medicaid at 4.69 percent against 3.77 percent.

Where it goes

A second live counter breaks the budget into 15 destinations, each running at its own rate. Payments to school districts lead at $65.56 a second, followed by state employee pay and contracted services at $61.28 and Medicaid at $43.08. The state's quarterly vendor payment records run alongside as a check.

Pensions and retiree health care for public employees total $594.7 million this year — 90 percent of what Vermont spends on every road, bridge and highway program combined, and 7.1 times what the state sends towns for their roads. Two of those costs, state employee pensions and state retiree health care, appear nowhere in the budget bill; they are recovered as a surcharge on departmental payroll. Together they account for about $259 million.

Behind the annual bill sits $4.97 billion in retirement obligations the state has promised but not funded, according to the most recent actuarial valuations for the state employees' and teachers' retirement systems — 53 percent of a full year's budget, or about $7,678 per Vermonter.

A final feature estimates the date each fifth of Vermont households finishes paying its taxes for the year, combining Congressional Budget Office figures on federal rates with an analysis of Vermont's tax system by income level. The dates run from Jan. 29 for the lowest-earning fifth to May 13 for the highest — a spread of 15 weeks.

Where Vermont publishes nothing usable — the state keeps no consolidated accounting of what residents pay in fees — the page says so rather than guessing.

The Spend-O-Meter updates on the schedule its sources keep: monthly for prices and home values, quarterly for wages and state payments, annually for budgets and tax collections. Corrections via the contact form.

The counter is running now — and it does not stop: the VT State Spend-O-Meter.