From T support to school aid, surtax emerges as crutch for state budgeting

                        

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From T support to school aid, surtax emerges as crutch for state budgeting   February 5, 2026 By Chris Lisinski

Depending on who you ask, there’s either a sea change underway in how Beacon Hill thinks about the billions of dollars now flowing into state coffers from the state surtax on high earners, or simply a natural evolution in thinking as budgeting grows more challenging.

In 2022, when voters approved the added levy on income over $1 million, backers of the so-called millionaires tax pitched it as a way to fund new programs in education and transportation. But a few years later, the approach is changing.

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The annual budget bill Gov. Maura Healey unveiled last week plus a companion proposal would together spend nearly $4 billion collected from the surtax. And for the second year in a row, hundreds of millions of those dollars would go not toward brand new programs or one-time expansions, but perennial investments like MBTA support or state aid for K-12 schools.

It’s a subtle but impactful shift from the first few state spending plans that deployed surtax revenue, which mostly earmarked the extra resources for novel uses such as expanding free school meals to all students.

Opinions on the shift differ among both supporters and opponents of the surtax. Some contend the measure was intended to spur new investments, and that using its revenue for recurring needs is an act of budgetary misdirection. Others think all that matters is for education and transportation, the two areas tied to the constitutional amendment, to receive more money than they did before.

Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, which opposed passage of the surtax, said voters “were sold a bill of goods.”

“This is completely not what it was supposed to do,” Stergios said on a recent episode of The Codcast.

Healey’s annual budget proposal would use $550 million in surtax money to pay for state aid to Massachusetts school districts, including all of the $241 million year-over-year increase required under the 2019 Student Opportunity Act funding reform law.

The Student Opportunity Act was enacted three years before voters approved the surtax, and Beacon Hill for years handled the growth it called for in state aid with existing resources.

That changed last summer, when lawmakers and Healey agreed to fund all of the 2026 budget’s $496 million increase in school aid using surtax dollars.

At the time, Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page told State House News Service we “certainly would hope that this much to fulfill the SOA wouldn’t be a part of next year’s budget.”

But next year’s budget is now here, and Healey wants to use even more surtax money for the statutorily required aid increase.

Page is giving that move a mixed review. On one hand, he said, school districts need the money, no matter where it originates. On the other, he said, the MTA would prefer for Beacon Hill to tap other funding sources so that the levy on high earners can be used “above and beyond what’s needed in the regular operating budget.”

“The most important thing is that we can fund what we need,” Page said in an interview. “However, for the long term, we absolutely do think that we should have the revenues we need so that the Fair Share funds can be used to build and not just keep us where we are.”

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More Context Growing health care pressure drives up spending in Healey’s annual budget (January 2026)  Supplementing or supplanting? Surtax spending gets ‘complicated’ (July 2025)

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