How Your Take-home Pay Varies By State
I had a vague understanding that different states had different levels of taxes (wow Florida with that no-income tax woot woot!), but never went deeper. The rise of remote work in the last couple years brought this question into sharper focus:
Given a remote worker allowed to live in any state, with salary not adjusted, how does their tax burden vary?
The data 🔗︎
I found a handy online calculator for the base data, ran it for a variety of salaries, then did some simple calcs on the aggregate across states & salary buckets.
Buckets I chose:
- $50k, $75k, $100k, $125k - (then for giggles & Silicon Valley folks) - $150k, $200k, $250k, $300k.
[ℹ️] If you want to dive deeper into the data for your exact salary, I highly recommend checking out that calculator, because they also provide extra information, like how much a marginal salary increase will net you. Example:
For instance, an increase of $100 in your salary will be taxed $25.15, hence, your net pay will only increase by $74.85.src .
Best & worst states, per salary bucket 🔗︎
This table goes through and compares the best & worst amounts of take-home pay for each of the salary buckets. My personal takeaways:
- I thought the difference between best & worst would be higher, but it’s fairly consistent around 8% of your base salary. Guess that’s the Federal taxes keeping things level.
- If I made
$75kbase salary in Hawaii and then moved to Florida, I’d have an extra$5,659.00to spend on plastic trinkets from Amazon. Wild! - If you aren’t moving highest taxes to lowest, but highest to mid tier, that number drops to median of
$3,335.00. A couple grand ain’t nothing, but that’s in best case scenario of highest taxes to average - which won’t be a lot of people. I haven’t done the calculations for averaging the difference between every combination of states, but it would likely be$2-4k.- I had originally hypothesized it would be a no-brainer to move for a free & sizable “bonus” to your salary. Looks like it’s not so cut-and-dry, especially considering moving can be an expensive endeavor on it’s own.
| salary bucket | best | worst | best_pct | worst_pct | best_state | worst_state | diff $ | diff_pct_of_base_pay | median $ | median diff $ | mean $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50k | $41,935.00 | $38,313.00 | 16.10% | 23.40% | Florida | Hawaii | $3,622.00 | 7.24% | $39,842.00 | $2,093.00 | $40,129.00 |
| 75k | $59,995.00 | $54,336.00 | 20.00% | 27.60% | Florida | Hawaii | $5,659.00 | 7.55% | $56,660.00 | $3,335.00 | $57,063.86 |
| 100k | $77,582.00 | $69,819.00 | 22.40% | 30.20% | Florida | Oregon | $7,763.00 | 7.76% | $72,946.00 | $4,636.00 | $73,473.90 |
| 125k | $94,710.00 | $84,336.00 | 24.20% | 32.50% | Florida | California | $10,374.00 | 8.30% | $88,827.00 | $5,883.00 | $89,406.49 |
| 150k | $111,984.00 | $98,902.00 | 25.30% | 34.10% | Florida | Oregon | $13,082.00 | 8.72% | $104,797.00 | $7,187.00 | $105,466.33 |
| 200k | $147,899.00 | $129,626.00 | 26.10% | 35.20% | Florida | California | $18,273.00 | 9.14% | $137,999.00 | $9,900.00 | $138,976.90 |
| 250k | $179,657.00 | $156,269.00 | 28.10% | 37.50% | Florida | California | $23,388.00 | 9.36% | $167,282.00 | $12,375.00 | $168,291.27 |
| 300k | $211,416.00 | $182,913.00 | 29.50% | 39.00% | Florida | California | $28,503.00 | 9.50% | $196,387.00 | $15,029.00 | $197,606.22 |
Range of rankings, per state 🔗︎
I was then curious about how states vary in ranking as income increases. My personal takeaways:
- Vermont (
28), New Jersey (25), and California (22) had the largest change in ranking across the 8 salary buckets. Seems like those are states that are pretty decent to be in at “common” salary bands, but if you’re crazy rich the taxes are giving you a hard time. - The top 10 states didn’t budge at all - this makes sense as 8 of them don’t have state income tax, and NH doesn’t tax earned wages
. North Dakota holds it spot by having it at <3% even if you make $500k/year
.
⚠️ It was mentioned to me that Washington has some FMLA Tax that doesn’t technically count as state tax, but which should end up demoting it on this list. I couldn’t find any specific % numbers to include, but if you have more info I’d appreciate if you reached out!
- Median change was
5places - which to me feels like a fairly consistent set of rankings. I have no stats background, so just nod along if that’s wildly innacurate 😅.
| Lowest | Highest | Diff | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Nevada | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| New Hampshire | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| South Dakota | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Tennessee | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| Texas | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| Wyoming | 7 | 7 | 0 |
| Alaska | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| Washington | 9 | 9 | 0 |
| North Dakota | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| New Jersey | 11 | 36 | 25 |
| Ohio | 12 | 17 | 5 |
| Arizona | 11 | 13 | 2 |
| Louisiana | 14 | 16 | 2 |
| Pennsylvania | 12 | 15 | 3 |
| Indiana | 13 | 16 | 3 |
| Vermont | 17 | 45 | 28 |
| Arkansas | 18 | 34 | 16 |
| Missouri | 19 | 26 | 7 |
| New Mexico | 20 | 25 | 5 |
| North Carolina | 21 | 24 | 3 |
| Oklahoma | 19 | 22 | 3 |
| Rhode Island | 17 | 27 | 10 |
| Alabama | 14 | 24 | 10 |
| Colorado | 18 | 25 | 7 |
| Iowa | 26 | 36 | 10 |
| Mississippi | 20 | 27 | 7 |
| Michigan | 16 | 28 | 12 |
| California | 29 | 51 | 22 |
| Delaware | 30 | 38 | 8 |
| Idaho | 31 | 40 | 9 |
| Kansas | 30 | 33 | 3 |
| West Virginia | 33 | 40 | 7 |
| Wisconsin | 30 | 34 | 4 |
| Maryland | 24 | 35 | 11 |
| Virginia | 34 | 39 | 5 |
| Georgia | 33 | 37 | 4 |
| Kentucky | 23 | 38 | 15 |
| Nebraska | 39 | 43 | 4 |
| Illinois | 22 | 40 | 18 |
| Maine | 41 | 46 | 5 |
| Utah | 26 | 42 | 16 |
| Massachusetts | 29 | 43 | 14 |
| Montana | 39 | 44 | 5 |
| New York | 42 | 46 | 4 |
| Minnesota | 44 | 49 | 5 |
| Washington DC | 47 | 49 | 2 |
| South Carolina | 42 | 48 | 6 |
| Connecticut | 43 | 49 | 6 |
| Oregon | 50 | 51 | 1 |
| Hawaii | 47 | 51 | 4 |
Fin 🔗︎
Want to play with the data yourself? Make a copy of the Google Sheet source and go wild! Questions? ideas? Let me know what you come up with on Twitter .