The Replacement Revenue Math
What would it actually take to replace property tax with a sales tax?
Methodology: this page doesn't present an official Kansas fiscal estimate. Illustrative calculations are arithmetic based on publicly reported revenue totals and are intended to show relative scale, not to predict what a real bill would do. Actual legislation would require a fiscal analysis accounting for tax bases, exemptions, behavioral changes, distributional effects, and local-government revenue requirements — the kind of work the Legislative Research Department does for a real bill. Every figure below is tagged: Official estimate for numbers published by a government agency, Coalition calculation for arithmetic we did ourselves from public data, and Hypothetical for an illustrative scenario.
The most commonly proposed replacement for property tax is raising the sales tax to cover the lost revenue. The math scales enormously with how much property tax is being replaced — a small, targeted swap looks very different from a full statewide repeal.
A Real Kansas Number: One Mill Levy
Official estimateIn May 2026, Kansas senators floated eliminating just the statewide 20-mill school levy (roughly $875 million/year) by raising the state sales tax by 0.75 cents — from 6.5% to 7.25%. This is a genuinely useful data point: it's a real, Kansas-specific estimate for the smallest, simplest piece of the property tax system to replace (one statewide rate, rather than thousands of local ones) — and even this narrower swap didn't advance, partly on concerns that a sales tax increase falls disproportionately on lower-income households.
Scaling Up: What Full Elimination Would Take
Kansas property tax (~28.2% of all state and local tax revenue) is roughly comparable in size to the entire state and local sales tax base (~29.2%) — sales tax and property tax raise almost exactly the same share of total revenue in Kansas today. Coalition calculation, illustrative As a rough order-of-magnitude illustration — not an official estimate — fully offsetting all property tax through sales tax alone would mean coming close to doubling the effective sales tax rate, from the current average combined (state + local) rate of 8.69% to somewhere near 17%. This is illustrative math based on relative revenue shares, not a state revenue analysis, and real modeling would need to account for differences in what each tax actually applies to.
Official estimate Texas offers a real, larger-scale, official estimate that confirms this general shape isn't unique to Kansas math: the Texas Comptroller's office reported that fully replacing the $81 billion the state collected in property tax in 2023 would require raising the state sales tax from 6.25% to roughly 22% — a figure a state senator characterized bluntly as showing "there's no way to eliminate them" through sales tax alone.
A Narrower, More Concrete Model: Pennsylvania
Official — proposed legislation Pennsylvania's approach is narrower and more concrete than a full statewide swap. Companion bills (House Bill 1649 / Senate Bill 962) would eliminate school property tax specifically — typically the largest single component of a homeowner's bill — and replace it by raising the personal income tax by 1.88 percentage points and the sales tax by 2 percentage points. Splitting the replacement across two tax types, rather than loading it entirely onto one, is itself a notable design choice.
The Base Is Already Narrower Than It Looks
Kansas eliminated its state sales tax on groceries entirely as of January 1, 2025 (a phase-out that started at 6.5% in 2022 and stepped down through 4.0% and 2.0% along the way). Local sales taxes on groceries still apply, but the state's own portion is already zero. Kansas's mission also calls for exempting groceries, gasoline/fuel, utilities, and prescription medication from a new replacement sales tax — each additional exemption shrinks the base a new tax would be collected on, meaning a higher rate is needed to raise the same amount of money from what's left.
What This Means for a Kansas Proposal
The consistent lesson across Kansas's own 20-mill example, Texas's official estimate, and Pennsylvania's split-tax design: a sales tax swap is most politically viable when it targets one specific, well-defined piece of property tax — a single mill levy, or school-only tax — rather than attempting to replace the entire system at once. It also draws immediate, predictable criticism that sales tax is regressive, falling harder on lower-income households than on wealthier property owners — a critique worth having a real answer to before proposing one.
None of this means a sales-tax swap can't work. It does mean that any specific Kansas proposal will face the same question North Dakota's failed measures ran into (see How Other States Have Tried This): the replacement mechanism has to be named and sized accurately enough to survive that math being checked in public, by opponents, journalists, and the Legislative Research Department's own fiscal note — not left to be worked out after a vote. A credible plan likely needs to either (a) accept a much higher sales tax rate than "nominal," (b) pair a sales tax increase with another source (as Pennsylvania does with income tax), or (c) target one specific levy rather than the whole system, as Kansas's own 2026 proposal did. Sales tax isn't the only option, either — see Other Ways to Fund Repeal for three different approaches states have used instead.
← Back: The Path to Repeal | How Other States Have Tried This | Next: Other Ways to Fund Repeal →
Figures on this page come from the Kansas Department of Revenue, Texas Comptroller's office, and other sources. See Sources for exact citations. Comparisons of relative revenue shares are a simplified illustration, not a Legislative Research Department fiscal model — a real proposal would need that level of analysis before going to a vote.