Good news on local income tax in Roscommon

A Michigan city income tax needs a city, and Roscommon County doesn’t have one. The county seat is the village of Roscommon, about a thousand people on the South Branch of the Au Sable, and everything else here — Houghton Lake, Higgins Lake, St. Helen — is township country. The law behind local wage taxes, the Uniform City Income Tax Act of 1964, hands that power to cities alone. Villages and townships can’t levy one no matter how they vote.

The nearest place that can sits 15 miles up I-75. Grayling, the Crawford County seat, is one of Michigan’s 24 income-taxing cities: 1% on residents, 0.5% on nonresidents who earn their money inside the city limits. Hold a job in Grayling and sleep at Higgins Lake, and that half-percent comes out of your check even though your own county can’t touch it. Grayling leans on the revenue, too — the income tax covers about a quarter of its general fund.

Back across the county line, government runs on the property-tax roll. A Roscommon Township homeowner with a principal-residence exemption paid about 24.5 mills in 2025, billed on the house and the land. Wages never enter the math — there’s no city here to ask for them.