Tools · retirement

What does saving for retirement cost you now?

What happens when you take it out — and what we will not guess

The other half of the question is whether your state taxes the money when you draw it. We can answer that for 51 of 51 jurisdictions, so the table below has 51 rows rather than 51.

Those 51 come from two different places, and the difference matters. 42 were checked state by state against revenue-department documents. The other 9 are the states that levy no individual income tax at all — for those, nothing was looked up, because there is no tax to apply to the money and so no exemption to find.

⚠️ This is deliberate. "Nobody has checked whether this state taxes pensions" and "this state does not tax pensions" look identical on a page, and one of them is false — on a page someone is using to plan a retirement. The engine returns nothing for an unverified state rather than a plausible answer, so a state missing below means we have not checked it, not that it takes nothing.

Factors to consider

• Whether you should contribute. This shows what deferring does to your tax bill and nothing else. It does not know your debts, your emergency fund, whether your employer matches, or whether a Roth suits you better — and none of those are things a calculator can decide for you.
• What your investments will return. The growth field is an assumption you can change, seeded from a long-run market average. It is not a forecast, and the figure it produces is arithmetic on your assumption rather than a prediction about your money.
• What tax you will owe on the way out. Traditional 401(k) money is taxed when you withdraw it. The federal side depends on rules and rates decades from now; the state side we can answer for 51 jurisdictions, and the table above is all of them.
• The Social Security you are buying. FICA is charged on your full salary up to the $184,500 wage base, and those contributions build a benefit. This page shows that the tax does not fall when you defer; it does not model the benefit.

Tax year 2026. Contribution limits from IRS Notice 2025-67 (IR-2025-111, 13 November 2025) — check them at the source. State retirement-income treatment from State revenue department retirement-income pages, estate-tax instructions and form booklets, per state — coverage partial, see each row's verified flag, verified 2026-09-17. Growth assumption is 7.0% a year, editable above. Federal brackets, FICA rates and every state's schedule come from this site's own verified datasets — see sources and methodology. Of the 51 states we have checked, 43 do not tax Social Security.