By Jason Hreha

Glossary

Time Tax

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 4 min read

A data analyst in New York loses her job early in the pandemic and files for unemployment insurance. For the next six months she calls, emails and posts on social media, trying to find out why the state will not send the money she is owed. Journalist Annie Lowrey opened her 2021 essay with this case, one of several people she had interviewed, and gave the cost they shared a label that stuck.

What is the time tax?

The time tax is the time, paperwork and effort people must spend to get the benefits and services that public programs exist to provide. Annie Lowrey popularized the term for US benefit programs in an essay titled “The Time Tax,” published in The Atlantic on July 27, 2021. She described it as “a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens” in exchange for benefits that, in her word, only “putatively” exist to help them.

Lowrey did not claim to have coined the phrase; she wrote that she had started thinking of administrative burdens as the “time tax.” The term had an earlier life in election law. Lawyer Elora Mukherjee used it in “Abolishing the Time Tax on Voting,” in the Notre Dame Law Review in 2009. She defined a time tax as a government policy or practice that makes one citizen spend more time to vote than others, chiefly through long lines.

The phrase is a metaphor. No one pays the time tax to a revenue agency. The point of the word “tax” is that the cost is real and compulsory, even though it is paid in hours, phone calls and frustration rather than money.

How it relates to administrative burden and sludge

Lowrey presented the time tax as a name for what researchers call administrative burden, and she quoted Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan’s book on the subject. In Herd and Moynihan’s framework, the burden has three parts: learning costs, compliance costs and psychological costs. The time tax puts the spotlight on time, although Lowrey’s own definition also includes aggravation and mental effort.

In public services, sludge is narrower again. Cass Sunstein defines it as friction that is excessive or unjustified. Not every hour of the time tax is sludge, a distinction the analyst’s case helps draw (see below).

Lowrey’s argument

The essay made four main claims.

  • The time tax is regressive. Lowrey argued that it falls hardest on people who are poor, sick or struggling and, she wrote, on Black and Latino families. Programs used mainly by wealthier households, by contrast, tend to be easy and automatic. Her example: a 529 college savings plan requires no application and no annual proof of need.
  • It is often deliberate. She argued that many programs are difficult on purpose, citing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said the state’s unemployment system had been designed with “kind-of pointless roadblocks.” She also blamed neglect of how programs are run. This echoes Herd and Moynihan’s argument that burdens are often political choices.
  • It should be measured. Lowrey noted that there was little hard data on how many hours people spend on program applications, and called for measurement broken down by race, gender, income, state of residence, and health and disability status.
  • It can be reduced. Her example was Michigan’s redesign of an 18,000-word benefits application, which she reported cut its words and questions by 80 percent. Her proposals included removing asset tests, interviews and work requirements, coordinating enrollment across programs, and rewarding agencies for higher take-up.

Lowrey expanded the argument in a 2026 book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time, and How to Fix It, published by Ecco.

Official use of the term

The phrase reached federal policy within months of the essay. Executive Order 14058, signed in December 2021, told agencies to reduce administrative hurdles and paperwork burdens “to minimize ‘time taxes,’” as quoted in the Office of Management and Budget’s April 2022 memorandum M-22-10. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report on administrative burden also used the term, for the time and effort people spend learning about and meeting program requirements.

The GAO report cites an Office of Management and Budget estimate that the public spent 10.5 billion hours on federal information collections in fiscal year 2023. That total is broader than the time tax on benefits, because it covers every kind of federal information collection, not only benefit applications. It is also a count of paperwork time. Writing about earlier estimates of the same kind, Sunstein cautions that some of those hours are justified, and that the worst friction, such as waiting in line, may not involve paperwork at all.

Where the metaphor stops working

The time tax is a useful name for a real cost, but it carries an argument inside it. Calling the hours a tax suggests they are imposed and largely wasted. Some are; others pay for checks that protect a program.

The New York analyst’s case shows both sides.

Any unemployment program has to confirm who a claimant is and that she lost her job. A short identity check before a first payment costs time, but it protects the program, so it is a burden that may well be justified. Six months spent chasing an explanation for money she was owed is different. If the state needed something more from her, telling her what it was would have protected the program just as well. That part of her time tax is sludge.

The test is the same for any hour: what does the step protect, and could a lighter step protect it as well?

The metaphor also understates costs that are not measured in time. A short interview can take ten minutes and still carry heavy stigma. Herd and Moynihan’s psychological costs capture that; a count of hours does not.

The guide How to Run a Sludge Audit of a Public Service applies that test step by step to a whole service, recording time, documents and the three kinds of cost at each step.

References