State Paycheck Taxes Compared: 12 States at Four Salaries (2026)

Twelve states, nine outcomes

The calculators on this site compute twelve states. Four of them — Texas, Florida, Nevada and Tennessee — take nothing at all from wages, so they share a single row below. That leaves nine genuinely different outcomes, and between them they cover every way a state can tax a paycheck: not at all, not at all but with payroll premiums (Washington), a literally flat rate on every dollar (Pennsylvania), a flat rate after something is subtracted first (North Carolina, Colorado, Michigan, Illinois), and graduated brackets (California, New York).

Every figure on this page is the state layer of a paycheck: state income tax plus every mandatory state payroll premium, such as California’s SDI or Colorado’s FAMLI. Federal income tax, Social Security and Medicare are left out on purpose. They are identical in all fifty states, so they can move your take-home but they can never change the order of the states. For the full after-tax paycheck, the take-home pay calculator adds them back.

The most expensive state depends on the salary

Filing single, no 401(k), no city tax. The most expensive state in each column is in bold:

Read down any one column and you get a ranking. Read across and the ranking breaks: the most expensive state is Illinois at $40,000, New York at $75,000 and California from $150,000. The reason is the structure, not the rate. Illinois charges 4.95% on nearly everything above a $2,925 exemption, so a modest salary pays close to the headline rate from the first dollars. California’s brackets start at 1% and 2%, so the same modest salary is taxed lightly — $1,103 at $40,000, including SDI, against Illinois’s $1,835. By $300,000 the bracket structure has pushed California to 9.18% of gross, while Illinois can never pass 4.95%.

Pennsylvania shows the opposite pattern. At 3.07% on every dollar, with no deduction and no exemption, its effective rate is 3.14% at every salary in the table: the 3.07% rate plus a 0.07% unemployment contribution that is also uncapped. That makes it mid-table for low earners and the cheapest income-tax state here for high ones.

What your next raise costs at state level

The table above is about averages. A raise is taxed at the margin, and the margin tells a different story. Here is how much of the next $5,000 each state takes:

For the flat states, the numbers barely change across the row. The exceptions are small. Colorado’s FAMLI premium and Washington’s PFML premium stop at the $184,500 Social Security wage base, so their marginal cost drops slightly at the top. California is the outlier: its marginal cost doubles between $40,000 and $150,000, and from $78,430 upward it stays at 10.6%, which is the 9.3% bracket plus 1.3% SDI with no wage cap.

Two edges fall between the round salaries in the table, and both are worth knowing if you are near them.

New York’s recapture zone. Once New York AGI passes $107,650, the state begins taking back the benefit of the lower brackets in $50,000 steps. A $5,000 raise from $110,150 costs $351.82, which is 7.0% of the raise, although the bracket that income falls in is 5.9%. PFL has already reached its cap at that salary, so the whole difference is the recapture.

The Illinois cliff. Illinois does not phase its exemption out. It withdraws the whole $2,925 once federal AGI passes $250,000 for a single filer. A raise from $247,500 to $252,500 therefore costs $392.29 in Illinois tax instead of $247.50. The extra $144.79 buys nothing. A traditional 401(k) deferral lowers AGI, so it can keep a salary on the right side of the line.

Filing jointly changes the order again

Here is the same comparison for a married couple filing jointly, with one earner:

The low end changes most. At $40,000, the cheapest state that takes anything from wages is Colorado, at $519. Colorado starts from federal taxable income, so a couple’s $32,200 federal standard deduction is already gone before the 4.40% rate applies. At $150,000, the same household change is worth very different amounts in each state:

California gives the most back for a joint return ($4,155.84), because its brackets double for couples and its exemption credit doubles too. Washington and Pennsylvania give nothing, since they have no deduction, exemption or bracket to double. The flat states in between gain only what doubling a single deduction or exemption is worth. The practical point: if you are comparing a move as a couple, the single-filer tables you see online can be wrong by thousands of dollars in either direction.

Not income tax, still withheld: the payroll premiums

Five of the twelve states withhold something from wages that is not income tax, and those amounts are included in every table above. Their limits vary a lot, which is why the order of states can change at high salaries:

The one to notice is California’s SDI. It has no wage cap, so at $300,000 it takes $3,900.00, which is more than Washington’s two premiums combined and 14% of California’s whole state layer at that salary. New York’s PFL goes the other way: it stops at $411.91 a year, so above roughly $95,350 it no longer grows with income. Colorado’s FAMLI figure is a ceiling rather than a fixed charge, because Colorado lets employers deduct up to half the premium, and an employer may choose to pay more of it.

The layer most comparisons leave out: city taxes

State comparisons usually stop at the state line. Some cities do not. At $75,000 filing single:

• New York City residents pay $2,472.09 of city income tax on top of $3,453.00 of state tax. With PFL, the total is $6,249.09, more than any state figure in the $75,000 column above. California’s is $3,749.57.
• Detroit charges residents 2.4% ($1,785.60 at this salary) and people who work in Detroit but live elsewhere 1.2% ($892.80). A Detroit resident’s total is $4,722.35, compared with $2,936.75 for most other Michigan cities.

Around twenty other Michigan cities, most Pennsylvania municipalities, Ohio cities and Maryland counties also tax wages. None of those is modelled here. In those places, the figures on this page are a floor.

What a state comparison cannot tell you

• Which state gets the tax. These figures assume you live and work in the same state. If you live in one state and work in another, the state where you work can generally tax those wages as well. The rules for credits, reciprocity agreements and remote work vary by state pair, and the result can differ from both columns.
• Credits. No state or federal credits are applied. For a lower-income household, credits can be worth more than the entire difference between two states.
• Everything that is not a paycheck. Sales, property and excise taxes often run opposite to income taxes. A state that takes nothing from wages still has to raise revenue somewhere. This page answers only the paycheck question.
• Next year. The California figures use the 2025 FTB tables; California indexes its brackets for inflation each year, so the 2026 amounts will differ slightly. Colorado can lower its rate for a year when TABOR surplus rules apply. Rates are rechecked when states publish new tables.

How to use these tables

1. Find the column nearest your salary, and use the married table if you file jointly. Compare the states you are choosing between, not the whole list.
2. If a raise or a job offer is involved, use the raise table too. What matters for a raise is the marginal cost, not the average.
3. Check whether you are near $107,650 in New York or $250,000 in Illinois. If you are, the tables above understate the cost of the next dollar.
4. Add any city tax that applies to you.
5. Then enter your exact salary in the take-home pay calculator. It uses the same engine as every table here, so its numbers will match.