The 2025-26 California Spending Plan: Other Provisions

Oct 16, 2025 - Control Sections 4.05 and 4.12. The 2024-25 budget included two control section —Control Section 4.05 and Control Section 4.12 —that were assumed to reduce ongoing state expenditures. Below, we discuss the assumptions around these two ongoing efforts to achieve operational efficiencies in the 2025-26 budget package.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5081/

The 2026-27 Budget: CDTFA’s Cannabis and Tobacco Programs

Feb 23, 2026 - Our analysis of these issues in the next two sections revolves around two overarching questions: How much should CDTFA spend on cannabis and tobacco enforcement? How should the state pay for these activities?
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5132

Updating the California Necessities Index

Aug 14, 2025 - Therefore, any measure that requires statistics on the prices of a small set of goods in metropolitan areas —which includes options A, B, and C —may be at higher risk to future BLS publication changes.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5065

Local Sales Tax Rebates in 2023-24

Sep 16, 2025 - We describe some key aspects of these rebates in the next section. Description of Sales Tax Rebates Statewide Total: $140  Million. In 2023-24, the Bradley-Burns tax raised $9.4  billion statewide. Of this amount, local governments paid roughly $140  million —1.5  percent —in rebates.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5074

Evaluation of a Tax Exemption for Zero-Emission Buses

Apr 15, 2024 - The first section provides background information. The second section describes the basic structure and goals of the ZEB exemption. The third section analyzes the exemption. The fourth section provides a recommendation for Legislative action.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4890

California’s Low-Wage Workers and Minimum Wage

Mar 11, 2024 - The following sections describe these strategies in more detail. Estimating Characteristics of Low-Wage Workers In this section, we describe the method we use to construct the estimates displayed in Figures 2 through 5 in the post Who Are California’s Low-Wage Workers?
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4878/4

California’s Low-Wage Workers and Minimum Wage

Mar 11, 2024 - In this section, we classify a job with a wage below the 20 th percentile of the hourly wage distribution as a low-wage job. In contrast to the $17.50 per hour definition used in the prior section and another post , this definition has a consistent interpretation over a 20-year period.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4878/2

California’s Low-Wage Workers and Minimum Wage

Mar 11, 2024 - Minimum Wage as Policy to Address Inequality In this section, we use data from the monthly Current Population Surveys (CPS) from January 2022 through December 2023 to estimate three measures of wage inequality.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4878/3

The 2025-26 Budget: Update on Implementation of New Firearm and Ammunition Tax

Feb 19, 2025 - BSCC = Board of State and Community Corrections; CDE = California Department of Education; JC = Judicial Council; DOJ = Department of Justice; and OES  =  Governor ’s Office of Emergency Services. Chapter  231 Requires Start-Up Loan for CDTFA.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4970

California’s Low-Wage Workers and Minimum Wage

Mar 11, 2024 - The estimates in the first section come from the 2023 Occupational Employment and Wage Survey (OEWS), which collected information about employment and wages in May 2022 and used an employment cost index to update wage estimates to the first quarter of 2023.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4878/1