Tax Day 2026: The Average Taxpayer Paid $4,049 for War and Weapons

Wars don’t just cost taxpayers at the pump. Here’s what the average taxpayer spent for different priorities in 2025

By Lindsay Koshgarian & Hanna Homestead, Institute for Policy Studies

More than half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. But last year, instead of investing in programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a Big Ugly Bill that cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cut health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.

Some of those changes, such as the deepest cuts to health insurance, won’t take effect until 2026 or later. Others are taking effect now and are visible in the war on Iran and the deployment of mass deportation forces in our cities.

These enormous sums for the Pentagon and militarism more broadly come with enormous costs to ordinary people — both in terms of the opportunity cost for other programs and the drain on our wallets. We broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.

We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid over $4,000 for weapons and war last year — a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages — even as the programs to help families get by are getting cut. We’ve compiled some of those findings below.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion in war funding for next year – a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers below — including the shockingly high line items for militarism and the dwindling sums for human needs — all the more lopsided.

Key Findings

The average taxpayer in 2025 paid:

• $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans.
• $1,870 for Pentagon contractors, more than twice as much as the $770 the average taxpayer paid for troops’ pay even as many troops rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families; and 15 times as much as the $124 the average taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs. The school lunch program alone serves about 30 million kids, while the average CEO pay at the top five Pentagon contractors in 2025 was $24,632,610.
• $136 for nuclear weapons, seven times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the U.S. Postal Service, a provider of good jobs and affordable deliveries, especially in rural areas.
• $119 for mass deportations and detentions, six times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the Federal Aviation Administration amidst a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers and a recent deadly crash.
• $57 for aid to foreign militaries, including support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, vs. just $49 for diplomacy to foster peace and prevent war.
• Our 2025 tax receipt doesn’t show the cost of the recent war on Iran, which started in February 2026. But if we place the 2026 Iran war costs in the context of our 2025 tax receipt and put the cost at $35 billion — a line the U.S. is likely on the verge of crossing  —  the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran, eight times more than the $16 the average taxpayer paid for a full year of home heating and energy assistance in 2025. In FY 2024, nearly 6 million households received help with heating and energy costs, including 2.5 million households with older adults, 2.1 million households where someone had a disability, and nearly a million households with young children.

If you worked and paid taxes in 2025:

• On 50 workdays your income taxes would have gone to weapons and war; including 23 workdays paying taxes for Pentagon contractors;
• On 9 workdays your income taxes would have gone toward all federal food and agriculture programs, including food stamps and free school lunches;
• On fewer than 7 workdays your taxes went toward all federal education programs, including public K-12 schools and higher education;
• For half a day, your taxes went toward international aid programs, many of which were cut by the Trump administration;
• And for 13 minutes, your taxes went to the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting.