Expanding Educational Opportunity for New Jersey Families
The Cost of Staying Out
New Jersey has not opted in
The Federal Education Tax Credit relies on private donations, not state spending, to fund scholarships. NJPI's question for New Jersey: are we willing to let New Jersey taxpayers fund scholarships for students in other states while New Jersey families receive none of the benefit? This tool breaks that cost down to the local level.
The statewide figure below is real 2023 IRS filer data. Everything below the fold, at the town/district level, is a modeled estimate built from each area's median household income (see Methodology).
Find your town, district, or legislative district
| Year | Joint returns (est.) | Individual returns (est.) | Participation | Loss |
|---|
Participation rate
Share of eligible households that donate each year
Methodology
New Jersey's statewide total — 1,919,000 tax returns with adjusted gross income of $75,000 or more, of which 1,172,630 are joint returns and 746,370 are single, head-of-household, or married-filing-separately returns — is drawn directly from the IRS Statistics of Income Division's Tax Year 2023 Historic Table 2. Under the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, an individual may claim a nonrefundable credit of up to $1,700 for a contribution to an eligible scholarship-granting organization, and Treasury and IRS proposed regulations (October 2026) provide a combined limit of $3,400 for married couples filing jointly. This tool counts each joint return at $3,400 and every other return at $1,700.
The IRS publishes filer counts at the state and ZIP-code level, but not by municipality, school district, or legislative district. To estimate figures at those geographies, this analysis combines 2020 Census population data with median household income from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2018–2022 American Community Survey (5-Year Estimates), applying an income-distribution model rather than assuming filers are spread evenly across the population.
σ = 0.55 is a standard-issue income-dispersion assumption (typical for lognormal fits to U.S. household income), applied uniformly statewide since town-by-town dispersion isn't published. This is what produces realistic variation: Millburn (median household income ~$232k) comes out around 362 estimated $75k+ returns per 1,000 residents, while Newark (~$46k median) comes out around 54 per 1,000, and Camden (~$36k) around 26 per 1,000 — instead of every town getting the same flat statewide rate. Splitting by bracket also captures that higher-income households are far more likely to file jointly: in New Jersey, 33% of $75k–100k returns are joint, rising to 61% at $100k–200k and 83% above $200k, so wealthier towns carry a larger share of $3,400 credits.
Coverage: median household income was matched directly for 470 of New Jersey's 564 municipalities using Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) data. The remaining 94 — mostly small townships that share a ZIP with a larger neighboring place — use their county's population-weighted average median income as a fallback.
Legislative districts: built from the 2021 apportionment map (effective 2024–2031). A handful of large cities are split across two districts (Newark: 28/29, Jersey City: 31/32, Elizabeth: 20, Clifton: 27/40, Guttenberg: 31/33); this tool splits their population and filer estimate evenly across the relevant districts, which will differ from the true line-by-line split.
School districts: New Jersey has no single canonical list mapping every regional/consolidated K–12 district to its sending municipalities that this tool could embed reliably. Use the "combine towns" picker to approximate your district's sending-town footprint.
Treat every number below the statewide dashboard as directional, not official.
Stay Informed:
Let's Connect (subscribe)
Work With Us:
Contact us to explore reforms and solutions that strengthen accountability while respecting workers and taxpayers.
