On October 1, the sales tax goes up across Los Angeles County. Nowhere will the increase land harder than the Antelope Valley, where shoppers in Lancaster and Palmdale already pay the highest sales tax rate in the United States.
One thing to know before anything else: the tax does not apply to groceries or prescription medication. Food and medicine will cost the same after the change as before it.
The increase comes from Measure ER, a half-cent county sales tax for health services that Los Angeles County voters approved narrowly in the June primary after the measure trailed on election night and came from behind as ballots were counted. It takes the county’s base rate to 10.25%. The tax runs five years and is projected to raise about $1 billion a year. Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Hilda Solis introduced it in January, and the Board of Supervisors voted the following month to place it on the ballot. The money is meant to shore up county health services against deep federal and state funding cuts. Mitchell called its passage “not a celebration but a declaration”.
Lancaster and Palmdale have paid a combined rate of 11.25% since the spring of last year — the highest in California and, according to Bloomberg, the highest in the country, ahead of Seattle. That rate is built from three-quarter-cent city increases that voters in each city approved — Measure YM in Lancaster and Measure PD in Palmdale — plus the county’s voter-approved homelessness tax.
Local officials have not simply taken everything on the table. Both city councils voted to defer an additional half-cent they were authorized to collect. The deferral is a scheduled phase-in later this decade rather than a permanent renunciation, though Lancaster Vice Mayor Crist said the council was “deferring it with the intent not to take it”.
The new county tax applies inside incorporated cities, meaning it stacks on top of what Antelope Valley shoppers already pay; Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who opposed the measure, said during the campaign that it would leave Lancaster and Palmdale the highest-taxed in the nation. The exact combined rate that takes effect October 1 has not yet been published by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. What can be said with certainty is that the county rate rises by half a cent — on top of the nation’s highest.
Where that rate sits is not incidental. The Antelope Valley was the last place in Los Angeles County where working families could buy a new single-family home, and that affordability drew a generation of Black families out of the city and into the high desert. Today, nearly one in five Lancaster residents is Black and roughly half are Latino; in Palmdale, roughly one in eight residents is Black — in both cities, a Black population share far above California’s overall. Census estimates suggest Lancaster’s Black population has declined modestly since the last decennial count.
A sales tax takes the same cents from everyone at the register, but not the same share of their income. A household that spends its whole paycheck pays the tax on all of it; a household that saves half pays on half. That is what makes a sales tax regressive — and why it is worth noticing where the highest rate in the country sits.
The increase was made possible by Assembly Bill 1768, an urgency measure Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the day before the vote, exempting Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties from the state’s cap on combined local sales taxes. The timing was procedural: the bill’s text states that immediate effect was needed to accommodate ballot measures already scheduled.
Supporters note the revenue restores county health care that federal cuts stripped away, and that voters — however narrowly — chose to pay for it.
For readers: the change takes effect October 1. Groceries and prescription medicine are exempt. Shoppers can look up the exact rate for their own address through the rate lookup tool at cdtfa.ca.gov.
Drafted by News Observed Editorial AI, human reviewed and published.