Do my gas taxes
pay for the roads?

FHWA Highway Statistics 2024 table HF-2 reports road disbursements across all levels of government. We subtract bond principal repayments from total disbursements, then divide by annual vehicle-miles traveled from VM-2. This includes capital outlays, maintenance, administration, highway safety and interest. Removing principal avoids adding debt repayment on top of construction spending in this annual benchmark.

Multiply that average by your entered miles. This is an allocation of spending, not the marginal cost of driving or the cost of a particular road. Heavy trucks, passenger cars and visitors share the denominator. Capital investment varies from year to year. Congestion, emissions, crash externalities, land and parking subsidies, and private vehicle operating costs are not valued. The calculator does not determine anyone’s full tax contribution or lifetime benefit.

State receipts come from FHWA SF-21; local receipts come from LGF-21. We add state and local highway-user taxes and tolls, other taxes/general funds, federal payments, miscellaneous income, and bond proceeds. Payments from local to state government and state to local government are excluded from the receipts sum, so internal transfers are not counted twice. D.C. is represented by its state-level table; LGF-21 has no separate D.C. row. Local data include estimates and biennial reporting.

This is the funding mix of state/local road authorities, including federal transfers—not the national federal government’s original source-of-funds mix. Federal transfers may reflect fuel taxes, general funds, borrowing and prior balances. We do not classify the entire federal bucket as a subsidy from non-drivers. Bond proceeds are financing, not new tax revenue; future debt service is outside these receipts. The detailed tables were selected because the published HF-1 summary’s state tax/toll columns do not reconcile to SF-21 and LGF-21.

No. The starting combined fuel-tax rate of 50 cents per gallon is an example, applied consistently in every state until you change it. The nearby reference is the listed state gasoline rate in FHWA MF-121T’s 2024 reporting period plus its federal gasoline rate. That reference can exclude additional state, local, sales or wholesale taxes and fees; it is not an annual average or a current total rate. Enter the combined rate appropriate to the scenario you want to compare.

Entered fuel taxes, vehicle taxes/fees and tolls are counted gross. Some of those receipts support transit or other purposes rather than roads, so payments entered are not necessarily dollars devoted to highways. Electric vehicles can have registration or road-use charges and pay other taxes; $0 in the fee field is an empty starting assumption. Monetary benchmarks are in 2024 dollars. Using today’s rates or fees creates a mixed-year scenario, not a current tax-bill estimate.

The scenario calculates in your browser. Copying a link includes the state, vehicle type, miles, MPG, assumed tax rate, fees and tolls. Anonymous page and interaction counts distinguish this calculator; state modeling is recorded separately as anonymous daily state counts. Each distinct state counts at most once per page load when you select it, edit a scenario, copy or download a result, or open a shared state scenario. An untouched initial default is not counted. Mileage, MPG, rates, fees, tolls, visitor identities and links to page views are not stored with those counts. The voluntary guestbook is separate.

Dollar tables are reported in thousands and converted to dollars. VM-2 reports millions of vehicle-miles. The extraction preserves source precision, checks category totals and reconciles state sums to the detailed source totals. FHWA includes estimates; apparent differences can arise from display rounding. Use the source tables below to audit the calculation.