Local penny pinchers can rejoice: La Plata County has the fourth-lowest tax burden in the state, according to a study that calculated how much money a roughly representative resident might pay in income, sales, property and fuel tax in each Colorado county.<\/p>\n
In more good news for Durango residents, the study also found that La Plata County is among the least-taxed counties in the country. Nationally, it ranked 422 out of the 3,300 counties it analyzed throughout the nation.<\/p>\n
According to the study\u2019s methodology, county-by-county comparisons are based on what SmartAsset.com deemed an \u201caverage\u201d person: the tax burden of a person who makes the national median household income, $51,939, who owns a $250,000 house, spends 35 percent of his or her take-home pay on taxable goods and drives a study-set average number of miles per year.<\/p>\n
Breaking down the \u201caverage\u201d La Plata County resident\u2019s tax burden by category, the study found that he or she pays $10,263 in income taxes, $767 in sales tax, $762 in property taxes and $183 in fuel taxes.<\/p>\n
Statewide, the \u201caverage\u201d Colorado taxpayer pays the same $10,263 toward income taxes that La Plata County residents pay but forks over $899 in sales tax, $1,323 in property taxes and $170 in fuel taxes.<\/p>\n
The SmartAsset study concludes that in Colorado, \u201caverage\u201d residents of Las Animas County enjoy the lightest tax burden in the state.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, bargain-hunting Colorado taxpayers may wish to avoid moving to Adams County.<\/p>\n
Ranked 1,939th in the country, the \u201caverage\u201d Adams County resident carries the heaviest tax burden in the state, paying $1,253 in sales taxes, $2,175 in property taxes and $208 in fuel taxes.<\/p>\n
cmcallister@ durangoherald.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
is Colorado\u2019s most-burdened<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5742,5735],"tags":[13,475,12],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-111609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-news","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-la-plata-county-colorado","tag-state-budget-and-tax"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111609"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=111609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}