Which Riverside County Cities Are Likely to See Declining Sales Tax Revenues in Near Future?
Not all cities are weathering the storm; some may be in for worse than others
I’ve been looking at taxable sales data, which we can find at the city level and are provided at a reasonable time lag (right now we have 2025-Q4 data). Source: CDTFA.
Taxable sales generate relatively more revenue for some cities than others, but in all cases they are important indicators of economic activity. They are something city governments watch very closely as they can impact revenues, even if mainly in a discretionary way.
Reviewing these data for Riverside County cities, it is clear some cities are doing better than others. In some cases, sales tax-related revenues are clearly decreasing. To follow along and check out your own city, see my Tableau Dashboard (public, free) here.
A typical desert city is Cathedral City; after taking a hit during the pandemic, taxable sales have recovered to trend and are mostly constant today. See also Palm Desert/Springs.
Other cities in Riverside County are actually doing very well on this metric. These cities benefited a lot from the pandemic and subsequent growth: Beaumont (near Banning but higher-income and -growth) is a clear case study, but we’ve also seen moderate increases in Murrieta and Temecula, and Lake Elsinore. Hemet and Banning are in this group as well - moderate increases, and not an explosion, but also not a decline, in taxable sales.
A final class of cities has quite clearly declined over the last few years. There are some surprises here. Menifee is down sharply, as are both Moreno Valley and Perris. All three of these major cities in Riverside County saw a small “dip” in 2020, a much larger “bump” in 2022 and 2023, but they have all come down in 2024 and 2025. Corona is also in this group, but the downturn has been relatively smaller there.
Other core cities like Riverside are up moderately, and the overall trend across the County is just slightly down. Let me know if you’d like to see San Bernardino County featured in a future post, or a breakdown by specific industry!