You may have never heard of the Census Bureau’s Selected Monthly State Tax Collections series, but state budget officers, legislators, businesses, and journalists depended on it. The data provided one of the only views of how state revenues, ranging from income and sales taxes to fuel, alcohol, and tobacco taxes, were changing month to month across all 50 states.
That early warning system is now gone. After May 2025, the Census Bureau stopped updating the series. The loss comes amid broader disruptions to the nation’s federal data ecosystem, which has included the removal of data from scores of government websites and scrubbed or changed data fields.
And it comes at an especially precarious time for state and local decisionmakers trying to assess impacts of tariffs, AI, a rising number of environmental disasters, and other economic and policy changes.
The Census Bureau monthly data series helped during, and after, a crisis
After the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how inadequate annual and quarterly data were for fast-moving decisions amid plummeting revenues, sudden job losses, and shifting filing deadlines, the Census Bureau launched the series as an experiment.
The reliable, standardized monthly figures on sales, individual income, and corporate income tax revenues quickly became essential to real-time decision making. Federal policymakers used it to tailor relief to states and localities and state decisionmakers to start planning pandemic recovery. More granular data held by state budget offices offered no insight on overall fiscal conditions or comparisons among states.
Post-pandemic, a broad community of users—bond analysts, national policy organizations, and news outlets—came to rely on the Census monthly revenue series as a common reference point.
There are few close substitutes to the federal data
Policymakers can still use Census’s Quarterly Summary of State and Local Tax Revenue. The valuable benchmark covers detailed tax categories and extends over a long historical period, making it indispensable for multi-decade analysis of state tax systems.
But policymakers can’t use it for real-time monitoring. The quarterly data typically arrive nearly 80 days after the end of each quarter, and revisions are generally limited to the prior seven quarters, meaning errors and classification issues in older data can persist for years.
And other federal data systems have become more fragile. The 43-day federal government shutdown in 2025 exposed their vulnerability, as it delayed releases and heightened uncertainty just as economic conditions were turning.
Data from the private sector are limited, too. Sample sizes are often unrepresentative, the incentives for collecting and publishing data differ from those of government, and the costs of producing high-quality, public-facing data can be prohibitive.
The State Tax and Economic Review Project continues to offer monthly data
The Urban Institute’s State Tax and Economic Review (STER) project has been building and maintaining monthly state tax revenue data since before the Great Recession, giving users two decades of consistent, high-frequency information.
STER compiles its reports directly from states and uses their data to reconcile and improve the timeliness and consistency of official Census benchmarks (such as the quarterly and annual state tax collections data).
These data cover all 50 states and focus on the major tax sources that drive state budgets: general sales taxes, personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, and total tax revenues. They are typically available 30 to 40 days after the end of the month, providing a significantly faster read on state finances than federal quarterly data releases.
Moreover, Urban staff work directly with state fiscal agencies to verify and correct figures in case of discrepancies or anomalies, helping ensure that the series remain internally consistent over time and comparable across states.
For example, the most recent data covering the first half of state fiscal year 2026 (July 2025 through December 2025) suggest some early warning signs for states. Overall, total state tax revenue growth was solid year-over-year, rising by 5.8 percent on average during the July-December 2025 period in nominal terms. But growth in the median state was only 3.6 percent.
Urban’s databases also go deeper than headline totals. For personal income taxes, for example, Urban collects detailed component information, including withholding taxes, estimated and final payments and income tax refunds, allowing analysts to see how swings in the stock market, capital gains, and high income taxpayers’ behavior show up in state coffers.
The project also compiles states’ own revenue forecasts for major tax sources—personal income, corporate income, sales, and total taxes—providing a window into how state officials themselves project their economies and budgets to perform.
On top of that, Urban tracks receipts from “sin taxes,” including casinos, racinos, lotteries, and marijuana, giving a more nuanced picture of how states are financing services and how sensitive those revenue streams are to economic cycles and policy shifts.
Where does this leave the data community?
As with data on jobs, food insecurity, and other aspects of the economy, independent, public-interest data providers like STER can step in to keep policymakers and the public informed.
STER can replace much of the functionality in the Census Bureau’s Selected Monthly State Tax Collection Series, but it can’t replace what made it unique. Those data provided a federal, standardized, timely public benchmark that covered a broad range of tax categories for years, and which carried the weight and permanence of official infrastructure. Data users, analysts, and policymakers are all worse off without it.
