Tax plan for millionaires: New York City (NYC) Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani proposed a tax plan during his campaign to target the wealthiest Americans living in the city in order to fund other infrastructure development needs for the people.
According to a recent Forbes report, Mamdani plans to tax millionaires living in New York to raise funds for projects such as universal free early-childcare services, free public bus rides and lower housing costs in the city.
What is a millionaire tax plan?
Zohran Mamdani proposed during his campaign that once in power, the 33-year-old democratic socialist would impose a 2% tax rate on the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million a year.
This proposal seeks to raise $4 billion a year to go toward infrastructure development needs for the city’s residents.
“This minuscule share of the city’s population,” according to Mamdani’s campaign website, cited in the news portal’s report, “takes home 35% of all income earned by New Yorkers.”
Although this proposed 2% additional tax only applies to people who make more than $1 million a year, the news report highlighted that the proposed millionaire tax would affect nearly 34,000 households in the city in an effort to make New York’s tax system more progressive.
Mamdani also reportedly said the same top 1% of New Yorkers benefited from tax cuts under the first Trump administration and more recently under the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law in July 2025.
Will Mamdani’s plan work?
During his campaign, Mamdani emphasized that it didn’t matter if a New Yorker made $50,000 or $5 million a year; the difference in tax it pays starts at 3.078% and goes up to 3.876%, a small increase in an otherwise high yield margin.
Zohran Mamdani argued that plans to tax millionaires would work, pointing to states like Massachusetts that already have a similar surcharge system.
In November 2022, Massachusetts approved a 4% surtax on personal income of more than $1 million, collecting $1.8 billion in taxes in the first three quarters since its implementation, according to a Forbes report.
“I will use every tool available to lower rents, create first-class public transportation and make it easier to start a family,” Mamdani said on his campaign website.
Although people fear that a millionaire might leave New York after the additional tax rates are imposed, a news portal report suggests that many Massachusetts residents have left, but they were mostly upper-middle class taxpayers and not millionaires.
