Take-Home Pay by State

What the numbers actually say

On a salary of $80,000, the difference between the best state and the worst is $6,426 a year — about $536 a month. The top of the table keeps $65,110; Oregon, at the bottom, keeps $58,684.

That gap is easy to misread, so it is worth being precise about what it is. Federal income tax and FICA do not change when you move — they are identical in all fifty states. The entire spread is therefore one number: Oregon’s state income tax bill, which comes to $6,426 at this income. Moving from the bottom of this table to the top does not reduce your taxes generally; it removes exactly one line item.

Why the top of the table is a tie, not a winner

9 states share first place. They are not close — they are identical, down to the dollar, because 9 states levy no income tax at all and the remaining federal and payroll taxes are the same everywhere. Any ranking that puts one of them above another is ordering alphabetically and calling it a result.

The middle is tighter than the headline suggests

The median state keeps $62,157, and 31 of the fifty land within $1,000 of that figure. For most of the country, the choice between one state and its neighbour is worth a few hundred dollars a year — real, but smaller than a single month of rent almost anywhere. The dramatic numbers live at the two ends of the table, not in the middle where most people are choosing.

How to use this

Take-home pay is one input into a much larger equation. A state with no income tax still has to fund itself, and generally does so through property taxes, sales taxes, or both — none of which appear on this page. Housing costs routinely swamp a $6,426 annual difference in either direction. And an effective rate of 26.65% versus 18.61% tells you nothing about what those taxes buy.

What this table is good for is putting a number on one specific variable so you can weigh it against the others honestly, instead of guessing. If a job offer moves you across a state line, this is the size of the tax piece.

How we calculate this

Every row is produced by the same engine as our paycheck calculator — we run one calculation per state against the salary and filing status you selected, then sort the results. Nothing on this page is typed in by hand, so the ranking updates the moment the underlying tax data does.

What is included

• Federal income tax — 2026 brackets and standard deduction from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32.
• State income tax — 2026 brackets and standard deductions, sourced from the Tax Foundation.
• Social Security — 6.2% on wages up to $184,500.
• Medicare — 1.45%, plus the Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% on wages above the filing-status threshold.

We assume the standard deduction, no withholding allowances, and no pre-tax deductions. This is an annual tax picture, not a withholding estimate — your actual paycheck depends on your W-4 and your employer's benefits.

What is excluded, and why

• City and local income taxes. New York City, Yonkers, Philadelphia, Ohio municipalities and Maryland's county piggyback taxes are not in this dataset. Where they apply they are substantial, so treat a high-ranking state with a taxing city as a state-level figure only.
• State disability and paid-leave payroll programs. Our dataset currently carries California's SDI but not the comparable programs in New Jersey, New York, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Washington and Oregon. Deducting one state's program while silently ignoring six others would bias the ranking, so we exclude all of them and rank on income taxes alone. We are sourcing the missing rates from the state agencies directly and will add them together.
• Pre-tax deductions such as 401(k), HSA and Section 125 benefits. These lower your taxable income in every state, so including them would shift all rows without changing their order much.

Known limits

Federal figures come from official IRS and SSA publications and we hold them to a high bar. State rates are verified against the Tax Foundation; state bracket thresholds are inflation-adjusted and can vary by a few percent from a state's own published tables, which matters only where two states finish within a few dollars of each other. Some states use personal exemptions rather than a standard deduction, and those are not yet modelled.

This is an estimate for comparison and education, not tax advice. See our calculation methodology and editorial policy for how this data is maintained and reviewed.