D&D 3.5 Tax Revenue

[Tvtyrant]

How much tax revenue would a king or city in D&D make? An untrained hirelings makes a silver a day, and a certain percentage of them are working at any time. What do you think a king of some 2 million people makes in a year? Not counting the local taxes and tithes.

[Chronikoce]

Those are two different questions. A city may be able to collect taxes in a more traditional sense where a small amount of money is collected from each shopkeeper and resident.

However a king usually rules over more than just a single city. Once you extend his reign beyond city limits the taxes collected likely stop being purely monetary in nature. For example, smaller villages may do most of their business by bartering goods and services and as a result would rarely have coin to pay. Instead they probably pay taxes in goods. The city folk have to eat after all so it makes sense that farmers pay taxes in the form of either a set amount of food or a percentage of their harvest.

The numbers would get complicated pretty fast if the kingdom is at war because then taxes increase, demand for food and other supplies increase, and soldiers have to be paid.

If you want a simple low end value though. Peasants make something like a gold per year. If we consider every single person to be at peasant wages and a tax rate of 35% then the king brings in at least 700,000 gp annually.

[Karl Aegis]

Whatever the budget says you get. Most likely you will have a net gain of 0 because you planned your expenses to match your revenues exactly. It's simple and effective.

If you're using levels for your kingdom, you get an appropriate amount of wealth for how much experience you gained that year.

[Fizban]

It took me a while, but I found a post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=17724534&postcount=35) I made regarding this in another, unrelated, thread. Thank you advanced search feature!

Basically, the PHB2 affiliation system is used for putting organizations and governments against each other. Based on how much straight cash it takes to buy extra government power, you can figure out how much stuff they actually have, and how much they're growing in terms of actual gp. It took me several iterations to figure out how to do it but I think I got it right in the end. There's also rules for taxing the peasants/working the mines in Stronghold Builder's guidebook, or you can try to figure something out based on the DMG's values for how much "ready cash" the city has on hand (assuming X growth percentage and Y tax percentage), but I prefer the affiliation version since it's on a properly large scale and has other uses built in.


Peasants make something like a gold per year. If we consider every single person to be at peasant wages and a tax rate of 35% then the king brings in at least 700,000 gp annually.
Poorly trained people with a skill modifier of +0 make an average of 5gp per week, and even untrained laborers make 1sp per day. So 36.5 per street laborer, or 260 for everyone that can practice a craft or profession (note that Profession: Farmer is a skill). But as mentioned above, that's mostly in trade goods and gets sunk into the kingdom's infrastructure. Depending on your literary sources the top dog might be taking as much as 20% of the taxes for himself, so say the king gets 20% of the local taxes from his capital city. For a properly feudal system where all the lords tithe up the chain he'd theoretically get a cut of everything else in the kingdom, but corruption on the way there could reduce the effect to practically nothing depending on who's involved.

[BWR]

You can also try to find a copy of the old Master rules (or was it Companion?) for BECMI, which detailed taxation and other income for landed characters. The gold system for that edition was a bit off by 3.5 standards so you'd probably want to knock off a couple of zeroes from the final sums.