Who Pays for the Schools? — All 169 Connecticut Towns

How much of each town's education budget local taxpayers fund, and how much the state's education grants cover.

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Picking a town highlights it in every chart and table on this page, and the highlight follows you to the other ranking pages. Clear the box to remove it.

Read this before ranking towns: an education budget and the taxes that fund it are different things. The state's Education Cost Sharing grant covers a share of every town's budget, and its formula sends the most to towns with the smallest tax bases. This page subtracts each town's state education grants from its adopted education budget to show the locally funded remainder. Three limits. First, ECS arrives in the town's general fund rather than being legally earmarked, so “ECS pays for education” is the grant's purpose and the standard convention, not an accounting fact. Second, the state's special-education Excess Cost reimbursement is not in the grant file used here, so true local shares run somewhat lower, unevenly. Third, federal grants (Title I, IDEA) flow through separate district grant funds outside these adopted budgets entirely, so they appear on neither side. The big cities' education lines also net out some grant-funded spending, which pushes their computed local shares down; read city figures as floors.
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Lowest local share
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Statewide median
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Highest local share

Local share of the adopted education budget

The part of each town's — adopted education budget left after subtracting its Education Cost Sharing and adult-education grants for the same year. Sorted lowest to highest. Rank 1 is the smallest local share, meaning the state covers the most; that describes the funding mix, not the town.

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Source: adopted education budgets from CT OPM (pcg4-s5rc) via ct_adopted_budgets.json; ECS and adult-education grants from CT OPM's statutory-aid estimates (sdcm-adr4) via ct_statutory_aid.json. The grant figures are estimates, revised, not audited receipts.

Locally funded education relative to resident income

The locally funded part of each education budget divided by an estimate of everything the town's residents earn in a year (ACS per-capita income × population). This is the state-aid-adjusted version of the effort question: after the state's grants, how large is the education budget that local taxpayers carry, next to local incomes? Both sides of the division are per-person figures.

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Source: same files as above, plus per-capita income and population from the US Census ACS 5-year estimates via ct_town_income.json. Not a tax rate. Part of the local remainder is paid by tax on businesses and non-resident property owners, whose income is not in the denominator.

The full table

All towns with the funding split in dollars and both ratios.

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How this ranking is made

Local share = (adopted education budget − ECS grant − adult-education grant) ÷ adopted education budget, all for the same fiscal year. Local effort vs. income divides that locally funded remainder by ACS per-capita income × population.

  • Why ECS and adult education only: they are the education grants in the state's town-keyed statutory-aid file. The Excess Cost special-education reimbursement and federal grants are not published town by town on a matching basis, so they are named as missing rather than estimated.
  • A town whose grants exceed its education line is not charted. That happens where a city's adopted education line nets out grant-funded spending, so no local share can be computed on this basis; the insight box names any such town.
  • Regional school districts: a member town's education line is its assessment payment and its ECS is its own grant, so the split stays town-keyed. The district's own grants are not visible here.
  • Estimates on both sides: adopted budgets are plans, statutory aid figures are estimates, and ACS income carries margins of error. Towns a few places apart are effectively tied.

More rankings: education spending vs. income · state aid dependence · education spending per student