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In the last lesson the budget filled up from taxes - that was the "money in" side of our little kitchen sink. Now let us meet those taxes properly and get to know them, because they are how a country funds absolutely everything it does. There is genuinely no need to dread this lesson, even if taxes sound dull or scary - the taxes here are just a small handful of percentages, and once you have seen the six of them laid out, you will be able to recognise every single charge that ever lands on you. Nothing here is designed to catch you out.

The place to look for all of this is the Taxes page. It lists every tax currently in force in a country, right alongside its current rate, so there is no guesswork. Open it for your own country and you can see exactly what you are being charged, today, in plain numbers. Open it for another country - using that handy country selector you already met - and you can see exactly what life would cost you there if you moved. It is simply a plain list of names and percentages, nothing more intimidating than that, and it is yours to read for free as often as you like.

The six kinds of tax

There are exactly six kinds of tax in the game, no more and no fewer, and each one is helpfully named after the thing it taxes. Let us go through them one at a time, slowly, so that each one is genuinely clear in your mind before we move on. Take them in turn.

• Sale Tax - paid by companies when they sell products. This one is a little special: there is a separate sale-tax rate for each product, so it is not a single number like the others.
• Salary Tax - paid by citizens when they receive their salary, in the same money the salary was paid (gold or national currency). If you have a job, this is the slice taken from you at the moment you get paid.
• Production Tax - paid in kind when gold or raw materials are collected from a building: a slice of the very gold or materials produced goes straight to the state budget. Energy products are never taxed this way.
• Rent Tax - paid by citizens when they rent items.
• Rewards Tax - paid by citizens when they receive a network reward.
• Dividends Tax - the tax on the daily dividend your game shares pay. A dividend is gold income, so it is charged at your country's production-tax rate, exactly like mined gold, and paid in gold into the state budget.

One piece of plain honesty about that list before we go on, because it will save you hunting for something that is not there. Only three of these are actually charged today: sale tax, salary tax and production tax. The rest exist as tax types a country could adopt, but no country currently sets a rate for any of them, so at the moment they cost you nothing. Your game-share dividend deserves a line of its own here: it genuinely is taxed, but at the production-tax rate rather than at a rate of its own, so you will never find a dividends percentage listed on the Taxes page.

Notice the gentle pattern in who actually pays each one. Five of the six - salary, production, rent, rewards and dividends - are taxes on citizens, charged at the precise moment you receive money, collect production or rent something. Sale tax is the odd one out of the group: it is paid by companies, when they make a sale. So whether any given tax touches you personally depends entirely on what you happen to be doing at the time. Earning a salary from a job? Then salary tax applies to you. Mining gold or harvesting raw materials? Then production tax applies. Running a company that sells goods? Then sale tax applies. You are never charged all six at once for the same single action - each tax is tied neatly to its own specific event, and only that event.

One rate each - except sale tax

Here is a distinction genuinely worth getting straight in your head, because it does surprise people when they first meet it. Salary tax, production tax, rent tax, rewards tax and dividends tax are each a single country-wide rate. There is one salary-tax percentage for the whole country, one production-tax percentage, one rent-tax percentage, and so on - simple and uniform, the same for everyone everywhere in that country. Sale tax is the exception to all of this: it is set product by product. That means a country can choose to tax bread at one rate and iron at a completely different rate. So when you look at sale tax specifically, do not expect to find one tidy number - expect a whole list, with one rate per product.

You might reasonably wonder why a country would even want that fiddly, detailed per-product control over sales while keeping all its other taxes so simple. The short and honest answer is flexibility. It lets a country gently encourage some kinds of business and lean a little harder on others, all by carefully tuning individual sale-tax rates, without ever having to change the broad taxes that hit everyone exactly the same way. The good news for you is that you do not need to design any of this clever balancing yourself - you just need to recognise, when you read the Taxes page, why sale tax shows so many numbers while the rest each show only one.

As a brand-new player, here is the genuinely practical takeaway to hold onto. Before you settle in a country, it is well worth a quick look at the taxes that will actually touch you, given your own plans. If you intend to take a job, the salary tax is the one to check first. If you plan to mine gold or harvest raw materials, check the production tax. If you mean to run a company that sells goods, scan the sale-tax rates on the products you actually care about. If you expect to rent things regularly, glance at the rent tax. You will not be paying all of these at once - only the ones tied to the things you genuinely do - so reading the Taxes page is really just about spotting the one or two rates that are relevant to your own little plan. None of it is a hidden charge; it is all laid out for you, plainly, in advance.

So, to recap the whole in-side of the budget: six taxes fund a country - sale, salary, production, rent, rewards and dividends. Five of them are single country-wide rates on citizens; sale tax is the special one, paid by companies and set per product. The Taxes page lists them all with their current rates, for your country or any other you fancy peeking at. Now that you know what the taxes actually ARE, the next lesson answers the very natural follow-up question: how on earth does a tax rate ever change in the first place?