page_title: Montana
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Montana / Economy
caption_attribution_description: English: Overlooking downtown of Billings, Montana, USA
context_page_description: Montana is a state in the Northwestern United States. Montana has several nicknames, although none are official, including "Big Sky Country" and "The Treasure State", and slogans that include "Land of the Shining Mountains" and more recently "The Last Best Place".
  Montana is the fourth-largest in area, the 8th least populous, and the third-least densely populated of the 50 U.S. states. The western half of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller mountain ranges are found throughout the state. In all, 77 named ranges are part of the Rocky Mountains. The eastern half of Montana is characterized by western prairie terrain and badlands. Montana is bordered by Idaho to the west, Wyoming to the south, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan to the north.
  The economy is primarily based on agriculture, including ranching and cereal grain farming. Other significant economic resources include oil, gas, coal, hard rock mining, and lumber. The health care, service, and government sectors also are significant to the state's economy.
  The state's fastest-growing sector is tourism.
context_section_description: The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates Montana's state product in 2014 was $44.3 billion. Per capita personal income in 2014 was $40,601, 35th in the nation.
  Total employment 2016: 378,463
  Total employer establishments: 37,626
  Montana is a relative hub of beer microbrewing, ranking third in the nation in number of craft breweries per capita in 2011. Significant industries exist for lumber and mineral extraction; the state's resources include gold, coal, silver, talc, and vermiculite. Ecotaxes on resource extraction are numerous. A 1974 state severance tax on coal (which varied from 20 to 30%) was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Commonwealth Edison Co. v. Montana, 453 U.S. 609 (1981).
  Tourism is also important to the economy, with more than ten million visitors a year to Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake, the Missouri River headwaters, the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, and three of the five entrances to Yellowstone National Park.
  Montana's personal income tax contains seven brackets, with rates ranging from 1.0 to 6.9 percent. Montana has no sales tax*, and household goods are exempt from property taxes. However, property taxes are assessed on livestock, farm machinery, heavy equipment, automobiles, trucks, and business equipment. The amount of property tax owed is not determined solely by the property's value. The property's value is multiplied by a tax rate, set by the Montana Legislature, to determine its taxable value. The taxable value is then multiplied by the mill levy established by various taxing jurisdictions—city and county government, school districts, and others.
  *In the 1980s the absence of a sales tax became economically deleterious to communities bound to the state's tourism industry, as the revenue from income and property taxes provided by residents was grossly insignificant in regards to paying for the impact of non-residential travel—especially road repair. In 1985, the Montana Legislature passed a law allowing towns with fewer than 5,500 residents and unincorporated communities with fewer than 2,500 to levy a resort tax if more than half the community's income came from tourism. The resort tax is a sales tax that applies to hotels, motels and other lodging and camping facilities; restaurants, fast-food stores, and other food service establishments; taverns, bars, night clubs, lounges, or other public establishments that serve alcohol; as well as destination ski resorts or other destination recreational facilities. It also applies to "luxuries"- defined by law as any item item normally sold to the public or to transient visitors or tourists that does not include food purchased unprepared or unserved, medicine, medical supplies and services, appliances, hardware supplies and tools, or any necessities of life. Approximately 12.2 million non-residents visited Montana in 2018, and the population was estimated to be 1.06 million. This extremely disproportionate ratio of residents paying taxes vs. non-residents using state funded services and infrastructure makes Montana's resort tax crucial in order to safely maintain heavily used roads and highways, as well as protect and preserve state parks.
  As of January 2019, the state's unemployment rate is 3.8%.
caption: First Interstate Center, in downtown Billings, is the tallest building in Montana.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot A610", "Image Software": "QuickTime 7.1.2", "Image DateTime": "2006:08:06 19:18:49", "Image HostComputer": "Mac OS X 10.4.7", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "178", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/500", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:08:06 11:13:14", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:08:06 11:13:14", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "287/32", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "95/32", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "80", "EXIF FocalLength": "73/10", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area"}