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California Billionaire Tax Has Enough Signatures to Land on Ballot, Backers Say
The measure calls for placing a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of California residents with at least $1.1 billion. Opponents are backing competing measures to counter the tax.
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The billionaire tax’s supporters, who have been gathering signatures for months, promoted the measure at a booth at the California Democratic Convention in November.
Credit...
Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
By
Laurel Rosenhall
Reporting from Sacramento
April 26, 2026,
11:32 p.m. ET
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The labor union backing a proposal to place a
new tax on California billionaires
says it has collected enough signatures to place the measure on the state’s November ballot.
Supporters have collected more than 1.5 million signatures on petitions that call for a vote on the proposed tax, according to a statement from the campaign on Sunday. The group backing the measure intends to announce on Monday when it will submit the signatures to elections officials.
If approved to go on the ballot, the proposal will kick off an expensive election fight that will tap into voter anxieties about economic inequality as well as concerns from business leaders that California could lose its luster as a cradle of technological innovation. Powerful people, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and numerous Silicon Valley executives, have vowed
to fight the proposal
, while Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent of Vermont,
has endorsed it
.
The measure calls for placing a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of California residents
with at least $1.1 billion
, and would dedicate most of the revenue to health care. The union leading the campaign, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, argues that the tax is necessary to make up for cuts to Medicaid and other federal health insurance programs
by the Trump administration last year
.
“Healthcare workers and our allies won’t quit until we fully protect our patients from the looming healthcare disaster,” Suzanne Jimenez, a leader of the union, said in a statement.
Opponents of the proposed tax intend to release a new economic study on Monday showing that the tax would devastate California’s ecosystem of start-up companies just as the artificial intelligence industry is in its nascency. The new tax would lead to a raft of consequences, the report says, including the loss of an estimated 108,000 high-paying jobs and billions of dollars in income tax revenue over the next two decades. The study was written by consultants who worked in the finance departments of two former California governors, Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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