Tax Income
The answer
Formula
Approx. wealth per plot per month: T1×1 · T2×2 · T3×4, scaled by rate; above ~10% drains approval.
Taxation is the one economic lever in Manor Lords with an explicit downside attached. Calculate it. Do not eyeball it. This tool takes your burgage plots by tier and a rate, and returns the monthly regional wealth it raises.
Tier is the whole model
Wealth scales with housing tier, not with population: plan on roughly 1 per tier-1 plot, 2 per tier-2 and 4 per tier-3 each month at a baseline rate. Put concretely, a level-3 plot pays 2 gold per family per month against a level-2 plot's 1.
Upgrading plots is therefore the most reliable way to raise revenue without raising the rate. The approval hit from upgrade-driven taxation is negligible, particularly with the Regensburg Guildsman origin, which pays for itself on almost any region.
The ten percent line
Above roughly 10%, tax steadily drains approval for as long as you leave it there, and approval below 50% stops your growth dead and starts families leaving. A rate that raises 20% more coin while cutting your growth from +2 families a month to +1 is not a good trade in any timeframe longer than a season.
The exception is a freshly conquered region: tax it hard, immediately. You are not building a long-term relationship with a population you just took, and the wealth is more useful now than the approval is.
Regional wealth is not your treasury
The two are easy to confuse and do completely different jobs. Regional wealth is what a region uses to import goods and upgrade its own burgage plots. Your treasury is personal wealth. It hires retinue and mercenaries, settles new regions, and it is what the Annual Royal Tax draws from if you enabled it at setup.
Tax via the manor moves money from the first pot into the second. A high tax rate therefore does not only cost approval. It also starves the region's ability to import and upgrade, which is the mechanism you were taxing to fund. Left too high for too long, taxation eats its own base.
A worked example
Take a settlement of eighteen plots, six at each tier. The baseline take is 6 + 12 + 24, so 42 a month at the reference rate. Now upgrade six of those tier-1 plots to tier-2 and the same rate returns 54, a 29% increase with no rate change and no approval cost worth naming. Raising the rate to reach the same figure instead would have put you above the ten-percent line and started the slow drain.
That comparison is the whole argument for treating taxation as a housing problem. The rate is a dial with a penalty attached; the tier mix is a dial without one. Spend your effort on the second and the first can stay where it is.
When to actually touch the rate
Three situations justify moving it. A freshly conquered region, as above: take the coin, accept the approval. A short-term treasury need with a known end date, such as hiring a mercenary company before a contested claim, where you raise the rate for two or three months and drop it again. And a settlement that has stopped growing anyway because it is out of housing land, where the approval you are spending was not buying you families.
Outside those, leave it. The default is close to optimal because the penalty scales continuously while the revenue does not. And the tier-3 plots that would make a higher rate lucrative are the same plots that arm your militia, so there is usually a better use for the approval you would have burned.
