What might the average annual income of a peasant in Westeros be? Would it vary from region to region? Would peasants pay their taxes in goods or coin, and would that go directly to their local lord? Sorry if you’ve answered these before, I did try searching your previous posts.

See here for incomes.
I imagine it would, with peasants in less fertile regions like the North or the Iron Islands or the rockier parts of the Vale having a lower income than in the Reach or the Westerlands, etc.
Tended to be more in kind than in coin, although there would be taxes you had to pay in coin which is why people would grow and market surpluses.
It would be a bit of a mix, with local lords collecting and keeping local taxes and rents, but also collecting royal taxes, which they would send to the monarch minus a share for their troubles.

Quick question about tourneys/ransoms as I’m rereading The Hedge Knight. After the first day of the tourney Dunk notes that Ser Humfrey Hardyng had beaten 14 knights over the course of the challenges. In that style tourney, is he getting a ransom from everyone of those knights? If so what would that be equivalent to if you could do the math? Feel like he would have been set for life if he had been able to survive the whole affair!

Good question!

It’s a bit tricky, because prices do fluctuate a bit. Let’s say a ransom is equal to the price of a horse and a suit of armor:

Horse prices: in 209 AC, Dunk sells Sweetfoot for three gold plus some silver, whereas 299 AC one gold per horse is the going rate. So let’s go with 1.5 gold on average.
Armor prices: in 209 AC, Dunk buys a set of plain steel armor for 800 silver (~3.8 gold), although this is mail, gorget, greaves, and greathelm rather than a full suit of plate, which one would guess would go for substanially more. The semi-canon RPG books give a price of around 14 gold for a suit of plate. So let’s go with an average of 9 gold.

So I would say that a tourney ransom is somewhere around 10-11 gold minimum, which means that Ser Humfrey made around 140-154 gold on the first day of the tourney. (Ransoms in times of war are a good deal higher – Brienne’s father offered 300 gold, which Jaime considers a good ransom for a knight – since there’s something of a disincentive to return an enemy combatant to the field.)

Now, how much is that worth? Well, given that a good income for a smallfolk works out to between 3.5-5 gold, that would certainly set an adult peasant up for the rest of their life. However, it’s not that extravagant by noble standards.

In terms of how much it’s worth by today’s money, that’s about $140,000-154,000 U.S dollars, which is quite a sum but not exactly “set for life” money.

About the taxation calculations, you’d said average yearly incomes to be about 3-5 dragons for the average person. Could you tell me how you arrived at that figure? Given that a proper warhorse in times of war costs approximately 1 dragon (Jaime’s estimate in ASOS), annual income of 3-5 dragons seems rather overly generous.

I took it from here:

The stableman gave him three gold pieces and the rest in silver. Dunk bit one of the gold coins and smiled. He had never tasted gold before, nor handled it…the heft of all that coin in his pouch made him feel queer; almost giddy on one hand, and anxious on the other. The old man had never trusted him with more than a coin or two at a time. He could live a year on this much money. (Hedge Knight)

So according to Dunk, 750 silver or three and a half gold (which he got for selling one horse, btw) is a good year’s income for a smallfolk like himself.

And since we see that a heavy meal of “lamb…as good as any he had ever eaten, and the duck was even better, cooked with cherries and lemons and not near as greasy as most. The innkeep brought buttered pease as well, and oaten bread still hot from her oven,” plus four tankards of ale works out to a handful of copper (when a loaf of bread costs three coppers normally) less than a silver, we can begin to get a sense of what kind of standard of living one could have one two silvers a day.

The reason why I took five gold as the high end is that the Hedge Knight happened a hundred years prior to the present of ASOIAF, and you would have gotten some inflation over that period.

But let’s take Jaime’s example: a fine warhorse works out to anywhere between a third and a fifth of a yearly income for a smallfolk – taking the average income in the U.S today, that horse is worth about $9,000-15,000 – which is pretty high, considering that the “American Association of Equine Practitioners estimates the minimum annual cost of owning a healthy horse — not including stabling costs — to be at least $2,500.”