This year’s Permanent Fund dividend, plus a one-time energy rebate bonus, will be a combined $1,702 per recipient, the Alaska Department of Revenue announced Sept. 19.
The amount is slightly higher than previous estimates from the spring, in part because the number of eligible Alaskans is lower than expected.
The payments will be direct-deposited into bank accounts starting Oct. 3. Paper checks, for those Alaskans who requested them, will be mailed later in October.
This year’s combined dividend is about $400 more than last year’s payment, in part because lawmakers set aside some of the state’s surplus oil revenue to boost the payment.
Since 2017, the Alaska Legislature has set the amount of the dividend via budget negotiations. That year, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers were not required to follow a payment formula that dates to the 1980s.
Legislators and Gov. Mike Dunleavy have been unable to agree on a replacement formula, and the amount has been set by political compromise since then.
In December, Dunleavy proposed using the traditional formula to pay a dividend of about $3,500 per recipient, but lawmakers rejected that proposal because — at proposed levels of spending on services — it would have resulted in a state budget deficit of about $1 billion.
Instead, legislators for the second straight year used an alternate formulation based on the annual cash transfer from the Alaska Permanent Fund to the state treasury.
They split that transfer 75%-25%, following an idea that originated with members of the Alaska Senate. Three-quarters of the transfer of investment earnings was reserved for public services, with the remaining one-quarter for dividends.
That accounts for $1,403.83 of this year’s dividend. The remaining $298.17 was covered by higher oil revenues. The energy relief bump started last year.
That year, lawmakers said that if oil prices and production exceeded a specific threshold, the extra proceeds would be reserved for a dividend bonus. That proposal was modified and confirmed this spring.
Designating the bonus as an “energy relief payment” is expected to make it exempt from federal taxes. The remainder of the dividend is still subject to federal taxation.
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