In this post, we provide an interim update to our formal revenue outlook for 2021-22, which was published in May. Using the methods discussed here, this interim update adjusts our May outlook to account for the most recent revenue and economic data and then compares this update to 2021-22 budget act assumptions. Next month, we will publish a more formal update to our multiyear revenue outlook in our annual Fiscal Outlook.
We currently project that there is a good chance that collections from the state’s “big three” taxes—personal income, sales, and corporation taxes—will exceed the budget act assumption of $170 billion in 2021-22 by at least several billion dollars. Currently, our best estimate is that there will be somewhere between $8 billion and $30 billion in unanticipated revenue. As reflected by the width of this range, with so much of the fiscal year ahead of us there remains significant uncertainty about how much the state ultimately will collect. We also caution that the implications of unanticipated revenues for the state's budget are not straightforward. As we discuss here, an additional $1 of unanticipated revenue results in, on average, about $0.40 of additional state surplus.
