The Bureau of Economic Analysis has completed its comprehensive update of state and local area personal income statistics, some reaching back as far as 1929.
Comprehensive, or benchmark, updates are performed approximately every five years. They provide the opportunity to incorporate newly available and revised source data and to introduce improvements in statistical methods. BEA’s full time series are updated to provide consistent comparisons over time.
As part of the 2018 comprehensive update, state and local area personal income statistics for more recent years were updated and published online last fall: data from 1998 forward for states and from 2001 forward for local areas, including counties and metropolitan statistical areas.
Those updates have now been carried back throughout the regional personal income times series: state annual data back to 1929; state quarterly data to 1948; and local areas to 1969. You can find the tables in BEA’s Interactive Data.
Also updated were the federal refundable tax credit tables for each state and the District of Columbia. These tax credit data are now available for 1976 to 2017. They show state totals subdivided into three categories: Earned Income Tax Credit, Additional Child Tax Credit, and others. The “other” category includes several tax credits, such as the Health Insurance Premium Assistance Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit in recent years.