Judge Rules Pittsburgh Must Abandon Its ‘Jock Tax’ On Visiting Players

The Steel City can no longer use its “facility fee” to tax visiting teams.

An Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas judge struck down Pittsburgh’s fee on nonresident professional athletes Thursday—its so-called jock tax—finding that it violates the state constitution’s uniformity clause by imposing higher burdens on visiting players than it does on Pittsburgh players performing at home.

The “jock tax” is a 3% levy on the incomes of visiting professional athletes and those who live outside Pittsburgh collected via a “non-resident facility usage fee” for major sports venues that are publicly funded by the city: PNC Park (Pittsburgh Pirates), Heinz Field (Pittsburgh Steelers) and PPG Paints Arena (Pittsburgh Penguins).

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, first filed in 2019, were three athletes—the New Jersey Devils’ Kyle Palmieri, Scott Wilson, formerly of the Buffalo Sabres and Detroit Red Wings, and ex-baseball journeyman outfielder Jeff Francoeur—along with the players’ associations of Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Hockey League. They claimed the fee was unconstitutional because they were required to pay it while Pittsburgh athletes weren’t.

The suit noted that Wilson paid a $6,000 fee to Pittsburgh in 2016; Palmieri, in the middle of a five-year, $23 million contract with the Devils, paid $1,900 to the city in 2016; and Francoeur, who made $1 million playing for the Atlanta Braves the same year, paid $800 to Pittsburgh.

The city argued that it was reasonable for Pittsburgh to seek payment from individuals who used the facilities that city taxpayers had paid for. But the court backed the defendants. It said it found “no permissible or rational basis for an unequal application of tax rates across residents and non-residents, and unequal application of tax rates across the same profession.” The facility fee, the judge said, “is a clear violation of the Uniformity Clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution.” The court issued an injunction forbidding Pittsburgh from collecting the facility fee.

Pittsburgh might have called it a fee, but the court saw it as a tax, said tax expert Robert Willens. The court’s ruling could lead to changes in other cities that try to squeeze payments from visiting professional athletes. “It seems clear that any city that has a system that treats nonresidents more harshly than residents,” Willens said, “will almost certainly find that the tax will eventually be ruled to be unconstitutional.”