State Income Tax Comparison

Read this before you trust the number. Forty-one states tax income, and most of them run their own brackets, their own deductions, their own credits and their own definition of what counts as income in the first place. Reproducing all of that would take a different tool. This page applies one approximate effective rate per state, calibrated around a middle income of roughly $75,000 to $100,000.

That makes it useful for the question people actually ask, which is “is this move going to cost me thousands”, and useless for filling in a return. It is least reliable at the extremes: at $30,000 a progressive state charges far less than the rate here suggests, and at $400,000 California charges far more. The nine states at zero are the only ones that are exactly right at every income.

Effective rate against marginal rate: Effective Rate = Total Tax Paid ÷ Income × 100

Your marginal rate is what the next dollar costs. Your effective rate is what the whole lot averaged out to. In a progressive state the effective rate is always lower, and it is the effective one that belongs in a relocation comparison.

The nine states with no income tax at all: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.

New Hampshire is a recent addition. It taxed interest and dividends until that levy was repealed at the start of 2025, so older articles still list it with an asterisk. Washington is the one to watch: no tax on wages, but a 7% tax on large long-term capital gains since 2022, which catches business owners rather than employees.

The money comes from somewhere. Texas has no income tax and property tax around 1.6%, roughly half again the national average. Tennessee has no income tax and one of the highest combined sales tax rates in the country, near 9.5%. New Hampshire has neither an income tax nor a sales tax and property taxes above 1.9%. A state does not stop needing revenue because it stopped taxing wages.

Worked example, $100,000 of income:

• Texas: no income tax at all, so $0
• California, at the roughly 5.2% effective rate used here: about $5,200

That $5,200 gap is real and it is worth caring about. Set against it: a house of the same size costs far more in most of California than in most of Texas, and the property tax bill on it will be roughly double in Texas as a share of value. Which way that nets out depends entirely on the house.

What this page deliberately does not include: sales tax, property tax, local income taxes (New York City adds up to about 3.9% of its own, and Ohio and Pennsylvania are full of municipal levies), and the cost of living, which usually swamps all of it.