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The gas tax in Illinois is just over 45 cents per gallon and
will increase to 47 cents in July.
“People that are having to drive to work that need some relief
because clearly we know that inflation is eating into
everybody’s budget,” said state Rep. Dan Caulkins, R-Decatur.
Caulkins said his proposal, House Bill 5852, is different from
Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s plan to eliminate the grocery tax because
communities around the state depend on that money to help run
their governments. He also said freezing the gas tax won’t
affect bridge and road projects around the state which are
funded by the gas tax.
“This does not take any money out of the projects, we’ve got $5
billion in there,” said Caulkins.
In 2022, Pritzker’s plan for pausing a scheduled increase in the
gas tax faced opposition, including from engineering companies
that design road and bridge projects. Officials with the
American Council of Engineering Companies of Illinois said
pausing the automatic increase could have long-term consequences
that could endanger funding for future transportation projects.
Illinois has had automatic annual gas tax hikes since 2019, when
Pritzker and the General Assembly doubled it and built in
automatic increases tied to inflation.
Just six years ago, the gas tax in Illinois was 19 cents per
gallon. Now Illinoisans pay the second highest gas taxes in the
nation at more than 45 cents behind only California.
According to the Illinois Policy Institute, the average driver
in Illinois is paying nearly $200 more a year in gasoline taxes
now than before Pritzker took office.
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