Each year, Oregon collects more than $250 million in income taxes paid by people from Clark County who commute to jobs across the Columbia River.
Clark County residents, in fact, pay more income taxes to Oregon than the residents of 31 of Oregon’s own 36 counties. Since the pandemic, though, the number of Oregon taxpayers who live in Clark County is down by about 8%.
There were about 79,000 people from Clark County who paid Oregon income taxes in 2019. That number was 72,000 in 2023, the most recent year for which Oregon has data.
Oregon doesn’t study why the number of Clark County taxpayers has declined. But Chris Allanach, head of the state’s Legislative Revenue Office, says “job location and remote work” are probably the main reasons.
Oregon is No. 2 among states with the most remote workers, and the share of people working remotely has grown significantly since the onset of COVID-19. If someone living in Vancouver has a job in Portland, they can spare themselves the Oregon income tax — and the sometimes-arduous commute — by working from home.
The decline in Oregon taxpayers from Clark County could also reflect the deteriorating job market in Portland. The city has been among the slowest in the nation to recover from the pandemic, and hasn’t fully replaced all the jobs it lost.
Few other places in the U.S. have performed that poorly. Employment in Clark County, for example, topped pre-pandemic highs by 2021 and is now up about 10% from 2019.
If the labor market is growing in Vancouver, and shrinking in Portland, there’s less incentive for workers to come to Oregon looking for a job.
The decline in the number of taxpayers from Clark County hasn’t been a big hit to Oregon state revenues, though. Partly that’s because Clark County residents pay just 2% of the state’s income taxes, so losing 6,400 taxpayers doesn’t represent a substantial loss.
And while fewer workers are crossing the river, those who do are making more. Clark County residents who pay Oregon taxes earned $3.8 billion in 2023. That’s an average of $53,000 per person, up from $49,000 in 2019.
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