$333.
That is how much the average American tax refund went up this year, and if you work tips or overtime anywhere in Fairfax County your number ran higher than that.
Hold onto it, because Virginia Democrats spent the same twelve months moving in the opposite direction.
That is a 17 percent increase. The average refund rose $333, or 11 percent, and the GAO said plainly where it came from: millions of taxpayers claiming the new deductions, including yes, no tax on tips and no tax on overtime.
Nobody in Fairfax County needs that explained.
The waitress at the diner on Route 50 who works doubles through the summer keeps her tip money now. The HVAC tech running overtime in August heat keeps the overtime. That is not a rounding error in a federal spreadsheet. That is the difference between covering the month and moving something to a credit card.
And it arrived in a year when everything else got more expensive.
Fairfax County is a tipped-work and overtime county whether or not it thinks of itself that way. The restaurants along Route 7, the salons in Springfield, the contractors and the delivery drivers and the hospital staff pulling extra shifts at Inova — those are the paychecks the two new deductions were written for. The refund is not an abstraction here. It is a specific number that showed up in a specific account this spring.
Former Attorney General Jason Miyares laid out the contrast in the New York Post on August 14, walking through how Virginia Democrats are dismantling the Commonwealth’s turnaround: a state that had delivered $9 billion in tax relief now facing roughly $37 billion in proposed new taxes, a carbon tax, and a payroll tax.
Miyares held the office of Attorney General for four years. He is describing a state he ran the legal department of, comparing what worked to what replaced it, and he put his name on it in the largest paper in the country. That is worth reading in full.
One government handed money back to the people who earned it. The other went looking for more. Both things happened to the same Fairfax family, in the same twelve months, and only one of them was on the news every night.
The deductions passed. The refunds went out. The GAO confirmed the number. Virginia Democrats did not cut a single one of the taxes they control.
Every member of Virginia’s congressional delegation is on the November 3rd, 2026 ballot. When they ask for another term, ask them which column their votes landed in: the $333, or the $37 billion.