“At the end of their 2024 fiscal years, U.S. state and local governments carried $6.1 trillion in total liabilities – including $1.5 trillion in pension obligations and $926.9 billion for retire health care (other post-employment benefits),” according to a detailed report from the Reason Foundation that was released on October 29.

The report includes detailed profiles for all the state governments, 2,445 counties, 9,571 municipalities and 10,536 school districts and permits users to compare liabilities, assets, debt ratios and more through interactive maps and sortable tables.

As the report explains, “State and local governments lag far behind public companies in providing financial transparency to stakeholders. Federal securities law requires public companies to provide financial statements in a standardized, machine-readable format to facilitate easy data collection, aggregation, and analysis. By contrast, states and local governments like municipalities, counties and K-12 school districts are not subject to this same requirement for modern data publication. Most publish their financial reports as standard PDF files, many of which are converted image files that are not searchable”.

The lack of accessibility of this important data stands in the way of public financial transparency and “impacts the ability of policymakers and taxpayers to understand the true financial health, indebtedness, and sustainability of the governments they fund, watchdog, and administer.”

How did the Reason Foundation come up with this detailed data? The organization extracted “key elements from government financial reports using proprietary software and the values are subsequently confirmed by human review to ensure data integrity.”

It’s not surprising to see that the states with the most debt tend to be the largest states by population, but more interesting is the debt load carried by states per capita. The top ten in order are: Connecticut, New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Delaware, Alaska, Wyoming, Washington and North Dakota.

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