Education Spending vs. Income — All 169 Connecticut Towns

What each town spends per student, measured against what its residents earn.

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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: a dollar figure per student means something different in a town where the median household earns twice as much. This page divides each town's per-student spending by its median household income. The result is an effort index, a measure of how large the spending is next to what residents earn. No household pays this share. State aid covers part of every education budget, and the biggest part in the lowest-income towns. One inherited limit matters most here: the per-student figure is the derived measure, and it understates the large cities, whose grant-funded spending sits partly outside the town figure. Those cities are also the lowest-income towns, so the understatement pushes them down this ranking in one direction. Read their positions as floors, not measurements.
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Lowest spending relative to income
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Statewide median
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Highest spending relative to income

Per-student spending relative to median household income

Each town's education spending per student (audited, —) divided by its median household income (ACS — release, the release covering that fiscal year). Sorted lowest to highest; rank 1 is the smallest ratio, which describes the ratio, not the schools or the town.

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Source: per-student spending from CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf: education_expenditures ÷ school_enrollment_average) via ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json; 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.

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Source: same files as above. The lowest-income corner is understated on the vertical axis; the note at the top of the page explains why.

The full table

All towns with the ratio, the per-student figure, median household income, and where each sits against the two medians.

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How this ranking is made

Effort index = (audited education expenditures ÷ average enrollment) ÷ 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 audited fiscal year, and the ACS release whose 5-year window covers it.

  • 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.
  • The city understatement is directional. Every caveat on the per-student page carries over, and the largest, grant-funded spending outside the town figure, is concentrated in low-income cities. It lowers exactly the towns this ratio would otherwise raise. Their true ratios are higher than shown.
  • Small towns move for small reasons: a handful of high-cost placements, or an income estimate's margin of error, moves the ratio noticeably.

More rankings: who pays for the schools · education spending per student · taxes vs. income · tax base & the four quadrants