Federal Dollars by State, Over Time

Parts One and Two followed fiscal year 2025’s $9.8 trillion from the taxes and borrowing that raised it to the people, governments and firms that received it. This part follows the money the last step, into the fifty states, and backwards twelve years: what each state is recorded as receiving, how that changed from FY2014 to FY2025, why some states get twice the national figure per resident, and the District six times, and one large correction that has to be made before any of it means anything.

The federal government’s own ledger of awards, USAspending.gov, records $1.16 trillion of Medicare in FY2025 not where the patients live but in the twelve states, and the counties, where the records place the entities CMS pays. North Dakota is shown receiving $123,129 per resident ($98,424 million ÷ 799,358 residents).

In FY2025 USAspending.gov recorded $5,219 billion of prime award obligations to the 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico: contracts $741 billion, direct payments $3,240 billion, grants $1,220 billion, loans and other $18.3 billion. Of that, $1,164 billion is Medicare (assistance listings 93.773, 93.774, 93.770), recorded by the state of the entity CMS pays; 88% of it in twelve states. Across the 50 states and DC, Medicare set aside, awards came to $11,781 per resident ($4,026.7 billion ÷ 341.785 million) in FY2025, up from $6,681 in FY2014 ($2,127.0 billion ÷ 318.386 million; +76% in nominal dollars, while consumer prices rose 36%: BLS CPI-U, fiscal-year averages, 236.008 to 319.997). The range between the lowest and highest state runs from Utah, $7,875, to Alaska, $25,027; the District of Columbia, at $70,232, is off every scale on this page.

What each state is recorded as receiving, FY2025

USAspending.gov’s state profiles total every prime award whose place of performance is in the state. “Medicare set aside” removes the three Medicare assistance listings, which are recorded in the states of the entities CMS pays rather than beneficiaries’.

The Medicare mirage

Before the time series can be read, $1.16 trillion has to be put in its place.

What the records say. Querying USAspending’s assistance records for Medicare Hospital Insurance (93.773), Supplementary Medical Insurance (93.774) and Prescription Drug Coverage (93.770) by recipient state returns $1,163.6 billion for FY2025. The recipient named on every one of these records is “MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS” — CMS reports Medicare as aggregate records — and the state attached to each aggregate is the state of the entity CMS pays: Minnesota $181.9B, Indiana $134.5B, Pennsylvania $119.4B, Kentucky $109.8B, North Dakota $87.9B, Connecticut $80.5B, Florida $77.6B, South Carolina $73.6B, Wisconsin $51.3B, California $45.4B, Tennessee $43.4B, Missouri $19.5B. Twelve states, 88% of the money ($1,024.8 billion of $1,163.6 billion); the other states and DC share the remainder, and 7 states (Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming) are recorded as receiving none at all.

What the people get. CMS’s own geographic file puts fee-for-service Medicare payments to North Dakota’s residents at $1.0B in 2024; Minnesota’s at $4.9B; Florida’s — the state with the most enrollees after California — at $28.7B. Spread by enrollment, North Dakota would carry about $2.6B of the national total (CMS Medicare Monthly Enrollment, 2025: 151,412 of 68,094,870 enrollees in the 50 states and DC × the $1,154.1 billion recorded to them, Puerto Rico’s $9.5 billion left out), not $87.9 billion. The pattern of recorded states is consistent with the home states of the Medicare Administrative Contractors that pay fee-for-service claims and of the largest Medicare Advantage and Part D plan sponsors; we did not retrieve the record-level recipient addresses to prove that identification, so it is stated as an inference under “What we could not verify”.

Why it matters for everything below. Taken as recorded, direct payments per resident are uncorrelated with how old a state is (r = −0.06 against the share of residents 65 and over). With Medicare set aside the relationship appears (r = 0.65), and the four programs that USAspending does record by the beneficiary’s address — Social Security, veterans’ compensation, SNAP and SSI — reproduce the agencies’ own state tables almost exactly (r = 1.000, 0.991, 0.999, 0.981). The recorded Medicare series has doubled since FY2014 ($578B to $1,164B) and shifted from Pennsylvania to Minnesota as the largest line, so a time series read naively would show Minnesota’s federal money growing 275% in eleven years ($11,066 to $41,530 per resident); set aside, it grew 60%, below the national 76%.

Twelve years, state by state

Per resident, in nominal dollars, FY2014 to FY2025.

What kind of money each state gets

Contract states. The District of Columbia (64% of its recorded awards are contracts), Virginia (59%), Connecticut (48%), Maryland (38%) and New Mexico (33%) are where the federal government buys things: the Pentagon’s and the civilian agencies’ contractors around Washington, submarines and jet engines in Connecticut, the national laboratories in New Mexico. Contract dollars follow installations and headquarters, not residents; contracts have almost no relationship to income (r = 0.24 against per capita income, 2024, n = 50).

Benefit states. Where contracts are thin, direct payments dominate: Florida (64%), Wisconsin, Wyoming, Kansas and Michigan all take more than three-fifths of their recorded awards as payments to people — Social Security above all, which alone is $1,558 billion of the $2,077 billion of non-Medicare direct payments recorded to the 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico in FY2025.

Grant states. New York (46% grants) and Alaska (45%) sit at the top for different reasons: New York’s Medicaid program is the largest per resident of any state and its 1332 waiver and transit grants are recorded here; Alaska’s grants — Medicaid at Alaska’s costs, highway, broadband and airport formula money, the Denali Commission and tribal housing — are spread over 737,000 people. Louisiana, Rhode Island and Oregon follow. Grants are where state governments’ own choices show — Medicaid expansion, and how much of their own money states put beside the federal match.

The pandemic, and what stayed

Between FY2019 and FY2021 the awards recorded to states rose from $8,213 to $12,862 per resident, Medicare set aside — a 57% rise in two years. By FY2025 the figure was $11,781: the emergency money left, but the figure never returned to its FY2019 level.

What the emergency money was. USAspending’s largest assistance listings name it. FY2020: the Paycheck Protection Program $532.3B (loans), the Coronavirus Relief Fund to states and localities $147.7B and the Provider Relief Fund to hospitals $99.7B (both recorded as direct payments), Education Stabilization $30.0B (grants). FY2021: State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds $350.0B (direct payments), Education Stabilization $229.8B (grants), PPP $279.9B, SNAP $135.7B against $55.8B in FY2019, Medicaid grants $516.0B against $393.6B, the Child Care and Development Block Grant $48.5B against $8.1B (USAspending, national totals by assistance listing).

Where it landed. The rise from FY2019 to FY2021 per resident ranged from $3,185 to $11,322 across the fifty states (DC: $32,392). The largest rises were in Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming — states with few people, consistent with PPP loans, farm payments and the fixed minimum allocations in the recovery funds weighing most per resident — followed by Louisiana, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont. The smallest were in Alabama, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho and Missouri.

What stayed. Grants per resident were $2,244 in FY2019 and $3,542 in FY2025 (+58%); direct payments (Medicare set aside) $4,113 and $6,021 (+46%), carried by Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments of 5.9, 8.7, 3.2 and 2.5 percent (SSA’s notices, 86 FR 58715, 87 FR 64296, 88 FR 72803 and 89 FR 85276) and after USDA’s 2021 revision of the Thrifty Food Plan, which raised the average SNAP benefit by $36.24 per person a month from October 1, 2021 (USDA release 0179.21, August 16, 2021); contracts $1,653 and $2,164 (+31%).

Giving or getting: the balance of payments, 2015–2023

Awards are what a state is recorded as receiving; they say nothing about what it pays. The Rockefeller Institute’s balance-of-payments estimates for FFY2015–FFY2023 (FFY2023 preliminary) allocate all federal spending and all federal receipts to states, by economic incidence rather than by address, and the pandemic years turn them inside out.

Net payers, then none, then a few. In FFY2015 twelve states sent Washington more than they got back: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Washington. By FFY2019 the list was seven — California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Washington. In FFY2020 and FFY2021 there were none: every state was a net recipient, because federal spending rose by about half while receipts barely moved (Rockefeller Table 3, the average of the states, FFY2019 to FFY2020: spending $82,588 million to $123,901 million, +50%; receipts $65,919 million to $64,503 million, −2%). In FFY2022 ten states were net payers again; in FFY2023 three — Massachusetts (−$967 per resident), New Jersey (−$2,011) and Washington (−$7).

The swing. The average balance of the fifty states went from +$3,521 per resident in FFY2019 to +$9,562 in FFY2020 and +$5,344 in FFY2023 — the post-pandemic level is still half again the pre-pandemic one ($5,344 ÷ $3,521 = 1.52). The largest two-year swings from 2019 to 2021 (our calculation, Table 11, FFY2021 less FFY2019) were Maryland (+$9,100 per resident), North Dakota (+$8,501), Virginia (+$7,867), New Mexico (+$7,721) and Louisiana (+$7,717); the smallest were New Hampshire (+$1,983), Idaho (+$2,841) and Utah (+$2,855).

Income explains the balance; it does not explain the awards. Across the fifty states the FFY2023 balance per resident falls as per capita income rises (r = −0.53): richer states pay more tax per head under a progressive income tax and draw less in means-tested spending. But total awards per resident, Medicare set aside, are nearly unrelated to income (r = 0.17), because contracts and the small-state floors pull the other way.

Why states differ: what the drivers can and cannot explain

Social Security and age. The program whose eligibility the law fixes by age follows age almost exactly. Florida, Maine and West Virginia at the top right; Utah, Texas and DC at the bottom left.

Direct payments and age. USAspending’s direct payments, Medicare set aside, follow age too (r = 0.65). As recorded, with Medicare in the state each record carries, the correlation is r = −0.06: the same chart with North Dakota at $116,853 and Minnesota at $37,278.

Veterans. Veterans’ compensation, pensions and medical care follow where veterans live: Alaska, Montana, Virginia, Wyoming and Maine at the top; New Jersey, New York, California and Utah at the bottom.

Medicaid and the match rate. The formula tilts the match rate steeply toward poor states (FMAP against per capita income, the three-year average 2020–2022 that the FY2025 formula uses, r = −0.94), yet federal Medicaid dollars per resident barely rise with it (r = 0.15): New York and Alaska at 50–52% match draw more per resident than Mississippi at 77%, because expansion and state spending decide the base the match applies to.

SNAP and poverty. A means-tested benefit follows poverty, but only halfway: eligibility rules, state outreach and participation rates set Louisiana ($389 per resident at 18.6% poverty), New Mexico ($456 at 15.8%) and DC ($461 at 16.4%) far above Utah ($115 at 8.4%), Wyoming ($102 at 10.0%) and North Dakota ($150 at 10.8%).

Grants and poverty. Grants do not follow poverty. Alaska, New York, Vermont and New Mexico are high for reasons of size, Medicaid design and tribal programs; Texas ($2,115), Florida ($2,117) and Utah ($2,238) are the lowest in the country; Texas and Florida have not adopted the Medicaid expansion (KFF, as of October 2026).

Contracts and income. Contract dollars follow bases, shipyards, laboratories and the Beltway, not incomes: Virginia, Connecticut, New Mexico, Maryland and Alabama high; Delaware ($347), Arkansas ($405), Minnesota ($427) and Oregon ($487) the lowest.

The balance and income. Once what each state pays is counted, income is the strongest driver: high-income states pay more in and get less back. The highest FFY2023 balances are Virginia’s (+$16,650), New Mexico’s (+$16,178), Alaska’s (+$14,760) and Maryland’s (+$13,037), because of what they receive; Massachusetts, New Jersey and Washington are below zero.

High-contrast pairs

New Mexico and New Jersey. New Mexico receives 2.0 times New Jersey’s awards per resident ($19,137 ÷ $9,548). Contracts are the largest gap (one recipient, National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, as USAspending records it, is $5.7B of the contracts recorded to New Mexico by recipient location; New Mexico’s contracts by place of performance are $13.5B); grants are nearly double, because New Mexico’s FMAP is 71.68% to New Jersey’s 50% and its Medicaid covers a larger share of residents: in 2024, 32.9% of New Mexico’s residents had Medicaid or other means-tested public coverage, against 17.4% of New Jersey’s (Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year, Table S2704, released September 11, 2025; civilian noninstitutionalized population; margins of error ±0.8 and ±0.4 points; survey-reported coverage runs below administrative enrollment counts, Boudreaux et al., Census Bureau working paper, 2013); direct payments are closer. Count what each pays and the gap widens: New Mexico netted +$16,178 per resident in FFY2023, New Jersey −$2,011 — the largest net payer of the fifty states (Rockefeller Table 6, FFY2023), with per capita income of $85,526 against $58,447 (BEA, 2024).

Virginia and Oregon. Virginia’s contracts per resident are 28 times Oregon’s ($13,578 ÷ $487). Its largest FY2025 contract recipients by recipient location, as USAspending records them, are Booz Allen Hamilton Inc ($6.6B), Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc. ($6.0B), General Dynamics Information Technology, Inc. ($4.6B), Science Applications International Corporation ($4.4B), Huntington Ingalls Inc ($4.2B), CACI, Inc. – Federal ($3.5B) and Accenture Federal Services LLC ($3.2B): five at addresses in McLean, Falls Church, Reston, Chantilly and Arlington, Atlantic Diving Supply in Virginia Beach and Huntington Ingalls in Newport News. On direct payments and grants the two states are ordinary: Oregon’s direct payments per resident are higher ($6,711 to $6,253), and its grants are half again Virginia’s ($4,751 to $3,180). Contracts are the reason Virginia is a large net recipient (+$16,650 per resident in FFY2023) despite per capita income of $77,492 (BEA, 2024).

Florida and Utah. More than one Floridian in five is 65 or over (22.85% in 2025); more than one Utahn in eight (13.02%). Social Security per resident is 1.6 times higher in Florida ($4,780 ÷ $3,002) and fee-for-service Medicare 1.9 times ($1,236 ÷ $636). Utah is the lowest state in the country for all awards per resident; Florida is below the national figure too, because its grants per resident ($2,117) are the second-lowest of any state — a non-expansion Medicaid program at a 57% match, spread over 23 million people.

Mississippi and Connecticut. The Medicaid formula gives Mississippi 77 cents of every Medicaid dollar and Connecticut 50. Yet federal Medicaid per resident is nearly the same ($1,890 against $1,830), and Connecticut’s grants per resident are higher. Connecticut implemented the Medicaid expansion on January 1, 2014 (KFF); Mississippi has not adopted it (KFF, as of October 2026). In federal FY2024 Medicaid spent about the same on each enrollee in the two states: $9,819 in Connecticut and $10,011 in Mississippi, federal and state together. The difference is who paid: the state’s share was $3,983 per enrollee in Connecticut and $2,391 in Mississippi, 41% and 24% of benefit spending (MACPAC, MACStats February 2026, Exhibits 16 and 23, CMS-64; benefits including DSH payments, excluding administration: Connecticut $10,835,314,555 total and $4,394,749,348 state ÷ 1,103,469 full-year-equivalent enrollees; Mississippi $7,154,286,312 and $1,708,513,636 ÷ 714,638). The balance of payments still favors Mississippi (+$11,714 against +$2,937 per resident, FFY2023, Rockefeller Table 6) because of what Connecticut pays, not what Mississippi gets.

North Dakota. USAspending records $87.9 billion of Medicare to North Dakota in FY2025 — $109,979 per resident ($87,912.8 million ÷ 799,358), more than the state’s entire economy per head (BEA: North Dakota’s 2025 GDP, $82,349.8 million ÷ 799,358 = $103,020). CMS puts fee-for-service Medicare payments to North Dakotans at $1.0 billion. The difference is where the records are coded. USAspending names no recipient: the recipient field reads “MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS”, and all $87.9 billion carries the county code for Cass County. The entity paid there is likely a contractor that processes Medicare claims for more than one state; that is our inference from the county code and the size of the sum, and USAspending does not confirm it. Set it aside and North Dakota is an ordinary state: $13,149 per resident, close to the national $11,781, with an FY2019–FY2021 pandemic rise of $8,072 per resident that was among the largest, consistent with PPP and farm payments on a small population.

Minnesota. Read as recorded, Minnesota’s federal awards per resident nearly quadrupled in eleven years, the fastest in the nation. Almost all of the rise is Medicare recorded to Minnesota: $25.0B in FY2014 and $181.9B in FY2025, 7.3 times as much ($181.9B ÷ $25.0B). Set aside, Minnesota grew 60%, among the slowest states; its contracts per resident ($427) are the third-lowest in the country.

The District of Columbia. Six times the national figure per resident ($70,232 ÷ $11,781 = 5.96), and almost none of it is for residents. DC’s contracts ($31.4B) are contracts performed in the District; contractors whose address is in the District account for $7.7B. Its grants by place of performance are $13.8B; by recipient location they are $24.3B, led by intercity-rail grants to Amtrak, whose recorded address is 1 Massachusetts Avenue NW in the District (USAspending recipient profile) ($8.1B under listing 20.326 and $6.7B under 20.315 in FY2025), with the District government’s own Medicaid grant at $3.3B. Its direct payments per resident, the one measure that follows people, are below the national figure ($4,948 against $6,021). IRS collections per resident in DC ($60,067: $41,665.3 million ÷ 693,645) are the highest in the country for the same reason in reverse: the tax paid by organizations headquartered there is credited to their address.

Alaska. Alaska’s grants per resident are 5.3 times Texas’s ($11,296 ÷ $2,115). Its FY2025 grant records are led by Medicaid ($2.5B, at Alaska’s costs and with the expansion implemented September 1, 2015, KFF), highway construction ($1.0B), the BEAD broadband program ($1.0B), airports ($0.4B), the Denali Commission and Indian housing block grants — formula programs with minimum state shares, spread over 737,000 people. Alaska also grew fastest of any state from FY2014 to FY2025 (+140% per resident, Medicare set aside), and its FFY2023 balance of payments (+$14,760 per resident) was the third-highest of the fifty states. Texas, by contrast, is the lowest state for grants and among the lowest for all awards: a state that has not adopted the expansion (KFF) and whose formula grants are divided by 31 million people.

Medicare per enrollee. The same national program pays 1.62 times as much per traditional-Medicare beneficiary in California as in Montana ($17,054 ÷ $10,514, actual, 2024). This is CMS’s own geographic file, by the beneficiary’s residence, so it is not an address artifact. Part of it is prices: on CMS’s standardized figures, which remove geographic differences in payment rates, the ratio is 1.32 ($13,254 ÷ $10,031); the rest is resource use (CMS), which mixes service use with beneficiaries’ health.

2019 and 2021. In two years the awards recorded to states rose 57% per resident ($8,213 to $12,862). Grants rose most in proportion (+75%: Education Stabilization $229.8B, Medicaid up $122B, child care up $40B); direct payments rose 47% (State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds $350B, SNAP up $80B); loans carried the Paycheck Protection Program ($280B in FY2021 after $532B in FY2020). Contracts rose 9% ($1,653 to $1,809). By FY2025 grants and direct payments were still 58% and 46% above FY2019.

Tying it together: from the ledger to a state

Parts One and Two accounted for every dollar in the Treasury’s books; this part uses a different book — the award records — and the two have to be reconciled before a state’s figure can be traced back to the taxes that paid for it.

Back to the ledger: a state’s Social Security is paid from the OASI and DI trust funds. In FY2025 the OASI trust fund paid out $1,420.8 billion and took in $1,240.4 billion — $1,097.4 billion of payroll tax, $63.7 billion of interest and $79.3 billion of other income — so outlays exceeded income by $180.4 billion. Its holdings of Treasury securities fell from $2,582.2 billion to $2,400.8 billion. The DI fund took in $197.8 billion and paid out $160.2 billion; its holdings rose from $177.8 billion to $215.4 billion (Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement, September 2025, Tables 4, 5, 6 (Schedule D) and 8). A state’s Medicaid grant is general-fund money — individual income tax first in the ledger’s convention; its contracts are general-fund and, for defense, the National defense function. Open The Federal Ledger and trace any of these recipient groups back to column A.