Education Spending vs. Income — All 169 Connecticut Towns
What each town spends per student, measured against what its residents earn.
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.
Per-student spending relative to median household income
Each town's net current expenditures per pupil (school year —) divided by its median household income (ACS — release, whose 5-year window ends in that school year's closing year). Sorted lowest to highest; rank 1 is the smallest ratio, which describes the ratio, not the schools or the town.
Source: per-student spending from the CT State Department of Education, Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil (CGS 10-261, field ncep) via ct_ncep_towns.json; a K-12 regional town’s figure is its district’s, named in from_district. Median household income from the US Census ACS 5-year estimates (B19013) via ct_town_income.json. Both are the same-era figures; the income figure is a 5-year pooled estimate with a margin of error.
Does more income mean more spending per student?
Every town plotted by median household income (horizontal) and per-student spending (vertical), same years as above. The dashed lines are the statewide medians. If wealthier towns simply spent more per student, the points would climb to the right. The chart shows how much they do, and which towns sit far off that pattern.
Source: same files as above. Towns of one K-12 regional district share a per-student figure, so they sit on one horizontal line.
The full table
All towns with the ratio, the per-student figure, median household income, and where each sits against the two medians.
How this ranking is made
Effort index = net current expenditures per pupil ÷ median household income. A value of 30% means the town's per-student spending equals 30% of what its median household earns in a year. The two sides are matched in time: the latest school year whose closing year has a published ACS release, and that release, whose 5-year window ends in the same year. That can be a year older than the newest school year on the per-pupil page, which needs no income to match.
- This is an index, not a burden. No household pays this share. Education budgets are funded by property tax on the whole grand list (including businesses and non-residents) plus state aid; the taxes-vs-income page measures what residents actually carry.
- Resident income is not the tax base. A shoreline town can pair modest incomes with an enormous grand list and fund high per-student spending at low effort from residents; the wealth page holds that side.
- Every caveat on the per-pupil page carries over, including what net current expenditures leave out and how regional districts are counted.
- Small towns move for small reasons: a handful of high-cost placements, or an income estimate's margin of error, moves the ratio noticeably.
- Top-coded income. The Census publishes a town's median household income at its top code (250,001) when the median is at or above the top of its published range, and annotates the cell. That figure is a floor, not a measurement, so a ratio divided by it is an upper bound: the town's true ratio is at or below the one shown. The page reads the annotation from
ct_town_income.json(median_household_income_note) and marks each such town in the table, the tooltips, the summary and the scatter, where it is drawn hollow. With the true figure, its rank could stay the same or move toward 1, never away from it.
More rankings: who pays for the schools · education spending per student · taxes vs. income · tax base & the four quadrants