Oregon leans on the personal income tax harder than any other state, and the 2024 returns show how little of the bill lands at the bottom of the income scale. Filers reporting adjusted gross income under $50,000 were about 44% of all filers and accounted for about 7% of total tax liability.
That split is the setting for a fight that will not reach voters for two years. On Oct. 8, the left-leaning Fight For Our Future coalition filed a proposed “Financial Assets Tax on Multimillionaires” aimed at the November 2028 ballot, OPB reported.
A Progressive Tax With A Low Top Bracket
Oregon’s income tax is progressive, and the top rate is not reserved for fortunes. The 9.9% bracket starts at $125,000 for single filers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly, a threshold that catches many professional salaries, not only multimillionaires. The state is widely counted among those with the nation’s highest personal income taxes.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has put Oregon’s dependence in plainer budget terms: personal income taxes supply nearly two-thirds of the state’s tax collections, a greater share than in any other state. A slow year for wages, bonuses or realized gains is therefore not a side issue for Salem. It is most of the tax system.
The earnings gap underneath that system is large on its own. Oregon’s top 1% of earners take in 1.7 times as much as the bottom 40% combined. The Department of Revenue’s 2024 statistics, in the portion that is fully reported, show the other end of the filing population carrying a small slice of the liability. Those figures describe filers and tax owed. They do not describe houses, brokerage accounts or wealth that never becomes taxable income.
Income On The Return, Wealth Off It
Oregon taxes adjusted gross income, a measure of income rather than a tally of everything a household owns. A worker’s financial picture can include resources beyond the income reported on a tax return.
The proposed wealth tax would focus on financial assets, a different measure from income. A household’s assets and its reported income are distinct measures.
Rajiv Sharma, an economics professor at Portland State University, has argued that the income gaps already visible in Oregon obscure even larger gaps in wealth. He has also made the mechanical point that extremely wealthy people often have very little of their resources captured in adjusted gross income. A salary is exposed. A fortune parked in assets can be mostly invisible to the tax that funds most of state government.
The Multimillionaire Assets Proposal
The filed measure would aim at that gap, and only at the far end of it. It would tax Oregonians with a net worth of at least $30 million, at 1% to 1.2%, on financial assets: stocks, bonds and cryptocurrency. A house, by itself, is not what the proposal is written to tax. The target is paper wealth held by residents already past a $30 million net-worth line.
Advocates estimate the tax would raise a net $1.5 billion per two-year budget cycle. That is their estimate, not money already booked. The same proposal would hand a 30% refundable state income tax credit to single filers earning under $45,000 and joint filers earning under $90,000. Because the credit would be refundable, it could come back in cash when it exceeds the income tax those filers owe.
Filing is not the same as qualifying. Organizers would need signatures equal to 6% of the total votes cast in the November 2026 governor’s race. The number itself will not exist until that election is counted, and nothing in the October filing establishes how many signatures have been gathered or whether the measure will make the 2028 ballot.
State Income Tax Brackets
Oregon’s top income-tax bracket starts at $125,000 for a single filer.
Someone can be in Oregon’s top income-tax rate without being anywhere near the $30 million net-worth line in the proposed wealth tax. The proposal, if it qualifies, would add a tax on specified financial assets for a much smaller group.
A high-income year does not necessarily mean a person meets the multimillionaire threshold in the 2028 proposal. Income and net worth are different measures.
What Neighbors Just Did At The Ballot
Washington spent 2026 arguing over a different instrument. Democrats passed an income tax earlier in the year on households earning more than $1 million. Early returns on election night had voters keeping it: as of 9 p.m., with 33 of 39 counties reporting, 58.1% had voted no on repeal. OPB described voters as appearing poised to retain the tax. Those were early returns, not a certified final result.
The campaign to keep Washington’s tax, funded by labor unions, raised more than three times as much as the campaign to overturn it. Oregon’s own recent record is less friendly to new business taxes. Voters in 2024 rejected a measure that would have imposed a 3% tax on business sales above $25 million a year. In November, California voters rejected a proposed one-time tax on the assets of the wealthiest, described as a billionaire tax.
Oregon’s version is neither of those votes. It is a recurring tax on financial assets, limited to residents at or above $30 million in net worth, paired with a refundable credit for filers well below the state’s top income bracket. Backers still have to collect signatures keyed to a governor’s race that has not happened. If they clear that bar, the question waiting in November 2028 is whether voters will tax stocks, bonds and cryptocurrency that the income-tax return does not currently reach, while the paycheck tax keeps carrying nearly two-thirds of collections.
