Pittsburgh to Cranberry Township
Pennsylvania Act 32 local earned income tax · ALLEGHENY to BUTLER County · tax year 2026
Home rate
3%
Pittsburgh, residents
Work rate
1%
Cranberry Township, non-residents
You pay
3%
the higher of the two
Cost of the commute
$0
a year, above the home rate
What this commute costs you
no extra local taxPittsburgh already charges its residents more than Cranberry Township charges commuters, so the home rate governs and the job adds nothing at all. You pay the solid bar only — Pennsylvania charges the higher of the two rates, never their sum. Local earned income tax only; state, federal and payroll tax apply on top.
What this commute actually costs
- Live in Pittsburgh, work in Cranberry Township, and your local tax is your home rate: about 3%. That is $1,800 a year on a sixty-thousand salary. The work location adds nothing. Pennsylvania charges whichever rate is higher, and yours already is.
- From Pittsburgh, this is destination number 10 of 23 tracked. From Cranberry Township, there is little to compare with. Few other routes into it are recorded.
- Residence controls this pairing: Pittsburgh levies about 3% on residents, at or above Cranberry Township's non-resident rate, so the outcome is the resident rate — about 3%, or $1,800 at the reference salary. Employers still withhold against the work location's collector, but the amount is unchanged and the residence is the ultimate recipient.
- From the origin, Cranberry Township is Pittsburgh's 10 destination of 23 recorded. From the destination, recorded inflows are too few to rank origins against one another, which is common for smaller workplaces in this dataset.
Where the money goes
A $75,000 salary
- Federal income tax$7,670
- Social Security and Medicare$5,738
- State income tax$2,303
- Yours$59,290
| Federal income tax10.23% | $7,670 |
|---|---|
| Social Security and Medicare7.65% | $5,738 |
| State income tax3.07% | $2,303 |
| Yours79.05% | $59,290 |
The arithmetic, side by side
| If you worked in Pittsburgh | $1,800 |
|---|---|
| Working in Cranberry Township | $1,800 |
| Difference | $0 |
On a reference salary of $60,000 a year. The local tax is flat, so every figure scales with your own pay.
What this page does not cover
- A common worry, answered. You do not pay Pittsburgh and Cranberry Township both. Only one rate applies, the higher of the two. The two councils then sort out between themselves who gets what, and your bill is unaffected.
- This covers the local tax only. Whatever Pittsburgh or Cranberry Township takes sits on top of state tax, federal tax and Social Security. Those three do not care where you live or work.
- Sixty thousand a year is a benchmark. It is not a guess at what people in Pittsburgh earn. No published wage figure exists for single municipalities. The rate is the durable part of this page. The dollars scale straight up and down with whatever you earn in Cranberry Township.
- A postal address in Pittsburgh does not prove which municipality taxes you. Boundaries and postcodes disagree often enough here that the state publishes a lookup. Philadelphia is a special case too. Its wage tax sits outside the rules that govern Cranberry Township.
- Workers commuting from Pittsburgh to Cranberry Township are subject to one rate, not two. The statute directs the employer to withhold the greater of the resident and non-resident rates; the allocation between the two taxing bodies is a remittance mechanic invisible to the employee. Treating the two rates as cumulative is the most common misreading of the statute.
- Only the local earned income tax component is modeled for the Pittsburgh to Cranberry Township commute. State and federal liabilities are constant across Pennsylvania municipalities and are excluded so the municipal differential is visible rather than buried inside a larger total.
- The reference salary is a stated benchmark, not an estimate of Pittsburgh earnings, for which no municipal-level published source exists. The local earned income tax is proportional, so all dollar figures for the Cranberry Township commute scale linearly with income and the rate comparison holds at every salary.
- Municipal taxing jurisdiction is determined by boundary rather than by postal address, and the two diverge frequently enough in Pennsylvania that the DCED lookup should be treated as authoritative for Pittsburgh. Philadelphia is additionally outside this regime, administering its own wage tax on residents and non-residents under separate authority, so it does not follow the treatment described for Cranberry Township.
Questions people ask
Do I pay local tax twice — once where I work and once where I live?
The rates compete rather than stack. about 3% where you live, about 1% where you work, and you pay the greater of the two.
Does working in a different town cost me anything?
On this route, nothing. You owe exactly what you would have owed working at home — the boundary is real on a map and invisible on your pay stub, which is not true of every pair of towns here.
Which town's rate am I actually paying?
Pittsburgh's, because it is the higher of the two. Where you live sets the rate on this route, so working across the boundary does not raise what you owe — it only changes who collects it.
Is this a common enough commute to be worth modeling?
1,103 workers make it. The pairing comes from federal commuting data rather than from guesswork, and thin routes are excluded rather than estimated.
How does Pennsylvania's local earned income tax law allocate liability between two districts?
Pennsylvania's local earned income tax law assigns the higher of the residence rate (about 3%) and the non-resident work rate (about 1%); liabilities are never summed. The employer withholds at the governing rate and remits through the work district's collector, which then distributes to the residence district.
Why is the marginal cost of this crossing zero?
Marginal liability from working outside the residence jurisdiction is zero on this route. The crossing alters the distribution of revenue between jurisdictions but not the employee's total. ⚠️ This is route-specific and does not generalise to other pairs in the same dataset.
Which district's rate governs on this route?
The residence rate equals or exceeds the work district's non-resident rate and therefore governs. Working outside the residence district does not increase employee liability on this route; it affects only inter-district distribution.
What is the basis for including this route?
Route volume is 1,103 workers, sourced from Census LODES origin-destination data. Pairs below the publication threshold are excluded rather than imputed, so page existence reflects measured commuting volume.