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Wealth and income inequality are projected to increase in Connecticut under President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” with high-income residents seeing average tax breaks of nearly $10,000 and low-income residents paying an average of $417 more annually.

According to a new study released by DataHaven, the legislation will exacerbate wealth and income inequality primarily through rollbacks on some Medicaid and SNAP qualifications and tax cuts favoring high-income Americans.

Some towns, including Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan, could see average annual tax breaks of more than $30,000 for high-income residents, according to the study.

The returns from the bill are heavily skewed toward high-income households. Greenwich will see an estimated $262 million in tax relief, Stamford will see $239 million and Fairfield will see $158 million. Greenwich has some of the highest levels of income inequality in the state, according to U.S. Census data.

Bridgeport, the most populous town in the state, will receive an estimated net change of $60 million, with $61 million in tax relief going towards high-income households. The bottom 25% in Bridgeport will lose — primarily through cuts to SNAP, Medicaid and other social service programs — more than $14 million, and low-income households are projected to pay an average of over $1,000 more annually.

This distribution is the case nationally. Baseline projections from the Congressional Budget Office found that, under the bill, “changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households.”

Households falling in the top and middle income distributions will see an increase in resources, while households in the bottom income distribution will see a decrease. This is due in part to changes to Medicaid and SNAP but also to federal tax provisions, including changes to student loan programs and to health insurance subsidy eligibility, according to a report from Phillip Swagel, the director of CBO.

DataHaven used the CBO report data, which did not consider the impact of tariffs or indirect effects of the bill.

Connecticut already has some of the highest income inequality in the nation, the fourth-highest Gini Index out of all U.S. states and territories, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 five-year American Community Survey. The index measures income inequality, with one representing perfect inequality and zero representing perfect equality.

Puerto Rico, D.C., and New York rank above Connecticut.

Norma Martinez HoSang is the director of Connecticut for All, a statewide coalition of labor, community, and faith organizations. She said the state already has a “upside down tax system” that H.R. 1 will make worse.

“In Connecticut and across the country, over the last many decades, what we’ve seen is the very wealthy continue to get like tax breaks, definitely at the state level,” HoSang said.

But now, things are worse, she said. Families are already starting to feel the impacts of federal changes.

“These are families that were already living paycheck to paycheck, [with] really no margin to be able to figure out how to pay for stuff,” HoSang said. “We’ve seen some families go without eating. It is here now, and if we don’t do something as a state, those effects are going to quadruple in the next four years.”

Sasha is a data reporting fellow with The Connecticut Mirror. She graduated from the University of Maryland in May with a degree in journalism and a minor in creative writing. For the past year Sasha was working part time for the Herald-Mail, a newspaper based in Western Maryland. She was also a reporter and copy editor for Capital News Service, the university’s wire service where she covered the state legislature, the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse, school board elections, youth mental health and climate change. Earlier in her college career, Sasha also interned at the Baltimore Magazine and wrote for numerous student publications including the Diamondback, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper.