Research · 3 of 6
The geography of the same purchase
The same thing, the same salary, fifty-one different answers.
The same car, the same salary, the same day. In Texas it takes $132,099 of gross income. In California it takes $153,607. The spread is $21,508 — on one purchase, for doing nothing differently except living somewhere else.
Only two things move between those figures: state income tax, which changes how much you must earn, and sales tax, which changes what you pay at the counter. The sticker price is held identical throughout.
The full spread
| Cheapest — Texas | $132,099 | Rank 1 of 30 computable states. |
|---|---|---|
| National median | $140,980 | Half the country sits either side of this. |
| Dearest — California | $153,607 | 16% more than the cheapest. |
"No income tax" is a poor guide
There are nine states with no tax on wage income, and the intuition is that they must be the nine cheapest places to buy anything. They are not. Here is where they actually land on this purchase:
| Texas | $132,099 | Rank 1 of 30 — but 8.25% sales tax in Harris County (Houston). |
|---|---|---|
| Florida | $132,259 | Rank 2 of 30 — but 6.98% sales tax in Statewide average. |
| Washington | $132,759 | Rank 3 of 30 — but 9.57% sales tax in Statewide average. |
| Nevada | $133,122 | Rank 4 of 30 — but 8.24% sales tax in Statewide average. |
| Tennessee | $133,414 | Rank 5 of 30 — but 9.61% sales tax in Statewide average. |
The trade is the whole story
States need revenue. A state that forgoes one major tax almost always leans harder on another, and the pattern is visible once you put both rankings side by side.
Heavy on income, light at the till:
| Massachusetts | $140,946 | Income tax rank 4 of 51, sales tax rank 35. Takes its share before you spend. |
|---|---|---|
| Virginia | $142,585 | Income tax rank 9 of 51, sales tax rank 42. Takes its share before you spend. |
| Oregon | $146,975 | Income tax rank 1 of 51, sales tax rank 51. Takes its share before you spend. |
Light on income, heavy at the till:
| Texas | $132,099 | Income tax rank 49, sales tax rank 13 of 51. Collects at the counter instead. |
|---|---|---|
| Washington | $132,759 | Income tax rank 50, sales tax rank 4 of 51. Collects at the counter instead. |
| Nevada | $133,122 | Income tax rank 45, sales tax rank 14 of 51. Collects at the counter instead. |
| Tennessee | $133,414 | Income tax rank 48, sales tax rank 3 of 51. Collects at the counter instead. |
Which of those is better for you is not a question with a general answer. It depends on the ratio between what you earn and what you spend. A high earner who saves aggressively is hurt more by income tax and barely touched by sales tax; someone spending most of what they make experiences the reverse. The same state is genuinely cheap for one and expensive for the other.
The rarest case is a state with no general sales tax at all — Oregon. There the shelf price really is close to the price at the till, which is unusual enough in the US that visitors routinely notice it.
Why the spread is smaller than the rhetoric
The gap between the cheapest and dearest state on this purchase is $21,508 — real money, and worth knowing. It is also 15% of the median cost, which is a smaller number than most people expect given how loudly state tax differences are discussed.
That is because the federal layer does not move. Federal income tax and FICA are identical in all fifty-one jurisdictions, and for most incomes they are the larger part of the withholding. State tax is the part that varies, but it is varying on top of a fixed and substantial floor.
Which is worth holding onto when reading anything about tax migration: the differences are real, they are computable, and they are almost never the largest term in a decision about where to live.
Where a state collects matters as much as how much
A state that taxes income but not sales takes its share before you spend. A state that does the reverse takes it at the till. For a high earner who spends modestly, the first is worse; for a modest earner who spends most of what they make, the second is. There is no universally cheap state — only states that are cheap for particular lives.
Which is the honest answer to "should I move for the taxes": it depends on your income, your spending, and everything the tax code is not.
What this comparison deliberately excludes
Everything above holds the sticker price constant, and that is a genuine simplification. In reality the same car does not cost the same everywhere — dealer pricing, local demand and documentation fees vary, and where we have verified state-level fee data the calculator uses it. But the point of holding price constant is to isolate the tax effect. Mix the two and you can no longer tell which part of the difference is policy and which is a local market.
It also excludes the things that actually dominate a relocation decision. Housing costs vary by multiples between states, not percentages. Salaries for the same job vary substantially, and frequently in the same direction as the taxes — high-tax states often pay more, which offsets some or all of the difference. Insurance, childcare and utilities all vary independently of tax policy.
A serious comparison of two states would have to net all of that off. This page does one narrow, honest thing instead: it isolates the tax layer completely, so you can see exactly how much of the difference is attributable to policy rather than to everything else that moves at the same time.
Why the same salary is not the same salary
Every figure on this page holds income constant at $75,000 across all fifty-one jurisdictions, which is analytically clean and practically fictional. Wages are not uniform, and the variation is not random.
High-tax states are disproportionately high-wage states, for reasons that have nothing to do with tax policy — they contain the dense metropolitan labour markets where the same job pays more. Which means a real comparison is rarely "the same salary, taxed differently". It is usually "a different salary, taxed differently", and the two effects frequently point in opposite directions.
We hold income constant anyway, because the alternative is worse. Modelling wage differences would require assuming an occupation, an experience level and a metro area, at which point the output stops being a tax comparison and becomes a career projection with a tax component. Better to isolate one variable cleanly and say plainly what has been held still.
Reciprocity, residency, and the cases this cannot handle
State income tax is levied on residents, and generally also on income earned within the state by non-residents — which produces genuine complexity for anyone whose life crosses a border.
Live in one state and work in another and you may owe both, with a credit in one for tax paid to the other. Some pairs of states have reciprocity agreements that simplify this; many do not. Remote work has made this dramatically more common and dramatically less well understood, and several states have been actively litigating where income is "earned" when the earner never leaves their kitchen.
This site models a single-state resident, which is the common case and the only one that can be computed without knowing a great deal more about you. If your situation crosses a state line, the figures here are a starting point rather than an answer — and it is one of the genuine cases where a preparer earns their fee.
The county problem
One more layer sits underneath the state figures, and it is the one most calculators ignore entirely. Sales tax in the US is not a state-level number. It is a state rate plus a county rate plus, frequently, a city rate and one or more special district rates — and the combined figure can vary by more than a percentage point within a single state.
Every sales tax figure on this site is therefore tied to a named county rather than a state average, and where a category's cost depends on it, the county is stated on the page. A state average would be tidier and would be quietly wrong for almost everyone who read it.
Compare your own basket across states →