State Income Tax Calculator 2026 — All 50 States Tax Rates & Brackets

Nine states levy no tax on wage income at all. In those states, the number on your federal return is the entire story — there is no second filing, no state withholding line on your pay stub, and no state bracket to plan around.

Two of the nine carry an asterisk worth understanding. New Hampshire spent decades taxing interest and dividend income while exempting wages; that tax was repealed effective January 1, 2025, so New Hampshire now has no income tax of any kind. Washington has never taxed wages, but since tax year 2022 it has applied a 7% tax to long-term capital gains above a threshold that started at $250,000 and is indexed upward each year. Neither affects an ordinary salary, but both matter if a large share of your income comes from investments.

What is this actually worth? For a single filer earning $75,000, the calculator above puts California's bill at roughly $3,017 and Texas's at $0. At $150,000 the California figure climbs past $9,000. Across typical middle and upper-middle incomes the saving generally lands somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 a year — meaningful, though rarely the whole picture.

The honest caveat is that states without an income tax still need revenue, and they collect it elsewhere. Texas and New Hampshire carry some of the highest effective property tax rates in the country. Washington and Tennessee lean on sales tax, with combined state and local rates approaching 10%. Nevada and Florida recover a large share from tourism. Before treating a move as a raise, compare the total burden — income, property, and sales combined — rather than the income line alone.

The rate you see attached to a state is almost never the rate you pay. Like the federal system, most state income taxes are progressive: income is sliced into bands and each band is taxed at its own rate. Only the portion of your income that falls inside a band is taxed at that band's rate — moving into a higher bracket never re-taxes the money below it.

California is the clearest illustration, partly because it has nine brackets and partly because its top rate gets quoted constantly without context. Those brackets, as applied by the calculator above for a single filer, are: 1% up to $10,756, 2% to $25,499, 4% to $40,245, 6% to $55,866, 8% to $70,606, 9.3% to $360,659, 10.3% to $432,787, 11.3% to $721,314, and 12.3% above that. A separate 1% Mental Health Services surcharge applies to income over $1 million, which is where the widely quoted "13.3%" figure comes from — it is the top bracket plus that surcharge, and it reaches almost nobody.

Work through a California resident earning $75,000. The state standard deduction of $5,540 brings taxable income to $69,460. The first $10,756 is taxed at 1% ($108). The next $14,743 at 2% ($295). The next $14,746 at 4% ($590). The next $15,621 at 6% ($937). The final $13,594 at 8% ($1,088). Total California income tax: $3,017.

Notice what that means. This taxpayer's top bracket is 8%, but their effective rate is 4.02% of gross income — roughly half the marginal rate, and nowhere near the 13.3% headline. Confusing the two is the single most common mistake people make when comparing states, and it consistently overstates the cost of living in a high-rate state.

The same $75,000 earned in Texas carries no state income tax at all, so the comparison is $3,017 against $0 — about $251 a month, or $30,170 over a decade before counting any investment return on the difference. Real, but worth weighing against Texas property tax rates that run well above California's, and against the fact that California's effective rate only climbs steeply at incomes far above this one. Run both states through the calculator at your own income before drawing conclusions.

The tables below rank states by the rate the calculator above applies, so what you read here matches what the tool returns. Two cautions before reading them as a ranking of tax burden.

First, a top rate describes only the last dollar of a large income. Hawaii's 11% applies far up the scale; a median earner there pays a fraction of it. Second, a flat-rate state can cost more than a progressive one at modest incomes, because the progressive state's low brackets do the early work. Pennsylvania's flat 3.07% applies to the first dollar earned, while California's first $10,756 is taxed at 1%.

Several states have moved sharply in recent years, generally downward, and a handful have flattened multi-bracket systems into a single rate. Rates shown reflect the 2025–2026 data set behind this calculator; check your state's revenue department before relying on any figure for a filing.

State and federal tax are not two sealed systems. The main bridge between them is the SALT deduction — state and local taxes claimed as an itemized deduction on your federal return, covering state income tax (or sales tax, whichever you choose) plus property tax.

For years that deduction was capped at $10,000, a limit introduced by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that hit high-tax states hardest. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the cap to $40,000, which changes the arithmetic for a large number of households. The higher cap phases down for taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income above roughly $500,000, so the biggest earners see less of it than the headline suggests.

Who actually benefits? Homeowners in states that combine meaningful income tax with meaningful property tax — California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and to a lesser degree Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland. The deduction is only useful if you itemize, and with the 2026 federal standard deduction at $16,100 single and $32,200 married filing jointly, a household needs substantial deductions before itemizing wins at all. The raised cap pulls many homeowners back over that line for the first time since 2018.

Work a concrete case. A New York resident pays $8,000 in state income tax and $14,000 in property tax, for $22,000 of state and local tax. Under the old rules the deduction stopped at $10,000, stranding $12,000. Under the $40,000 cap the full $22,000 is deductible. That additional $12,000 of deduction, for someone in the 24% federal bracket, is worth about $2,880 in reduced federal tax — and the state income tax portion alone accounts for roughly $1,920 of deduction value.

One further wrinkle catches people out. States do not automatically adopt federal tax changes. Some conform to the federal code on a rolling basis, so a change like OBBBA flows into the state return immediately. Others use static conformity, frozen to the code as it stood on a fixed date until the legislature votes to update, and a few define taxable income entirely on their own terms. This is why a federal change can cut your federal bill while leaving your state bill untouched, and why the two numbers move independently from year to year.

The default rule is simpler than most people expect: you owe income tax to the state where you physically perform the work, not the state where your employer is headquartered. Sit at a desk in Texas and the work is Texas-source income, whichever state signs your paychecks.

So the common case resolves cleanly. If you work remotely from Texas for a company based in New York, your wages are generally Texas-source — and Texas has no income tax. Your employer may need to register for payroll purposes in your state, but the liability follows your feet, not their letterhead.

Then there is the exception that breaks the rule. A handful of states apply the convenience of the employer test: if you work out of state for your own convenience rather than because your employer requires it, that state still treats your wages as its own source income. New York enforces this most aggressively, with Pennsylvania, Delaware and Nebraska applying versions of it, and Connecticut and New Jersey applying it on a retaliatory basis against residents of states that use the rule. Under this test, a New York company's remote employee living in Florida can still owe New York tax — unless the remote arrangement exists because the job genuinely requires it, such as a role tied to a location where the employer has no office.

Where two states both claim the same income, you are not usually taxed twice in full. Your resident state taxes your worldwide income but grants a credit for taxes paid to another state, generally limited to what your home state would have charged on that income. The practical effect is that you pay the higher of the two rates, not the sum. Claiming it means filing a nonresident return in the work state and a resident return at home, in that order.

The rules diverge by worker type. W-2 employees have withholding handled by an employer that may or may not be registered in their state, and a mismatch shows up as a surprise balance due. Independent contractors receive no withholding at all, owe self-employment tax on top of income tax, and are generally sourced to where the work is performed — but they may also trip business nexus or local filing rules in the state where the client sits.

A concrete scenario: an engineer lives in Nevada and works for a company headquartered in California. Does California tax them? Generally no. California taxes nonresidents only on California-source income, and work performed entirely in Nevada is not California-source. California also does not apply a convenience-of-employer rule. But the answer changes if they spend working days physically in California — those days create California-source wages and a nonresident filing obligation — or if they hold California rental property, business income, or similar in-state income. Track your working days by state; that log is the evidence if a state ever asks.