Minn. committee adopts A1 amendment to social-media excise tax bill and lays House File 31-17 over for 2025 tax package

House File 31-17, carried by Chair Kelly Gomez, would create a monthly excise tax on social media platforms based on the number of Minnesota residents whose data the platforms collect and process. The House Taxes Committee adopted an A1 amendment clarifying that the text refers to social media platforms and then laid the bill over for possible inclusion in the 2025 omnibus tax bill.

The bill’s sponsor, Chair Kelly Gomez (Representative), told the committee the measure “imposes an excise tax on social media companies based on the number of Minnesota residents who use their services in a month and whose data they are mining.” Gomez said the tax is intended to make platforms that profit from data mining “paying for some of the social costs” linked to their services.

Under the version described in committee, the proposal sets a graduated monthly excise schedule as explained by Chair Gomez: no tax for platforms with fewer than 100,000 Minnesota users in a month; for 100,000–500,000 users, a rate described as “10¢ a person over a $100,000”; for 500,000–1,000,000 users, “$40 plus 25¢ per head”; and for platforms with more than 1,000,000 Minnesota users, “$165,000 plus 50¢ times the number of…