Paycheck calculator by state (2026)

Same salary, 51 different paychecks

Type a salary into the table above and the engine computes the take-home in every state and the District of Columbia with each one's own brackets, deduction and exemptions, for a single filer with a clean W-4 paid every two weeks. On $85,000 the spread runs from $2,639.52 in Alaska to $2,385.52 in Oregon: $254.00 per paycheck, or about $6,604 a year, from the state line alone.

Two things the table makes obvious. First, the federal part — income tax withholding and FICA — is identical in every row; only the state column moves. Second, the ranking is not fixed: change the salary and the order changes, because graduated states are gentle at the bottom and steep at the top while flat states are the same all the way. That is why «which state is cheapest» is a question about your salary, not just the state.

Every row links to that state's page, where the calculator is fixed to the state, the local taxes are listed, and the withholding form, the neighbours and the examples are specific to it.

The three kinds of state

No income tax on wages (9): Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming. Federal tax and FICA still apply in full. These states fund themselves through property tax, sales tax and, in a couple of cases, natural-resource revenue, so the paycheck advantage does not always survive the cost of living.

Flat rate (13): Arizona 2.50%, Colorado 4.40%, Georgia 4.99%, Idaho 5.30%, Illinois 4.95%, Indiana 2.95%, Iowa 3.80%, Kentucky 3.50%, Louisiana 3.00%, Michigan 4.25%, North Carolina 3.99%, Pennsylvania 3.07%, Utah 4.50%. One rate on taxable wages after a deduction or exemption, so the marginal and effective rates are nearly the same and withholding is simple.

Graduated (29): Alabama 2.0%–5.00%, Arkansas 2.0%–3.90%, California 1.0%–13.30%, Connecticut 2.0%–6.99%, Delaware 0.0%–6.60%, District of Columbia 4.0%–10.75%, Hawaii 1.4%–11.00%, Kansas 5.2%–5.58%, Maine 5.8%–7.15%, Maryland 2.0%–6.50%, Massachusetts 5.0%–9.00%, Minnesota 5.3%–9.85%, Mississippi 0.0%–4.00%, Missouri 0.0%–4.70%, Montana 4.7%–5.65%, Nebraska 2.5%–4.55%, New Jersey 1.4%–10.75%, New Mexico 1.5%–5.90%, New York 3.9%–10.90%, North Dakota 0.0%–2.50%, Ohio 0.0%–2.75%, Oklahoma 0.0%–4.50%, Oregon 4.8%–9.90%, Rhode Island 3.8%–5.99%, South Carolina 2.0%–5.21%, Vermont 3.4%–8.75%, Virginia 2.0%–5.75%, West Virginia 2.2%–4.82%, Wisconsin 3.5%–7.65%. Brackets like the federal ones: only the slice inside each bracket pays that bracket's rate.

States with local income taxes

15 states let a city, county or school district tax wages on top of the state: Alabama, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. The mechanics differ. Pennsylvania municipalities and school districts each set an earned income tax and the resident pays the sum; Ohio charges a municipal tax where you work and a school district tax where you live, with no credit between them; Indiana and Maryland charge by county on state taxable income; Michigan cities charge residents one rate and non-residents half; New York City and Yonkers have their own schedules; Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama, Delaware, Oregon, New Jersey, West Virginia, Colorado, Iowa and Kansas have city or county taxes in specific places.

The calculator carries the official registers for Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Maryland and Michigan, the New York City schedule, and the individual cities with a flat tax elsewhere. Where a state allows local taxes but the specific jurisdiction is not loaded, the result says so instead of silently omitting it. The local income taxes guide explains each system.

Moving states: what really changes

The paycheck is the visible part of a move and usually not the largest. The state line on $85,000 ranges over about $6,604 a year; a change in rent or a mortgage between two metro areas can be several times that, and property tax on the same house can differ by a similar amount. The state pages give the paycheck figure and a cost-of-living reference; for the full picture of a relocation, the property side is covered on our sister site's [state comparisons](https://estimatetax.net/compare/states/).

Timing matters too. Most states tax you as a resident from the day you move, so a mid-year move means two part-year returns. And a few states with no income tax still have things that look like one — Washington's capital gains tax, Tennessee's old tax on interest — so «no income tax» is specifically about wages.

Living in one state, working in another

If you live in one state and work in another, the default is that you file in both and your home state gives a credit for tax paid to the work state, so you end up paying roughly the higher of the two. A set of state pairs override that with reciprocity agreements: you pay only your home state and give your employer a form to stop the work state withholding. The main clusters are around Pennsylvania (with New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana), the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota in various pairs) and DC with Maryland and Virginia.

Commuting into a no-tax state from a taxing one does not remove your home state's tax; commuting the other way — living in Texas, working in Oklahoma — means paying Oklahoma on the wages earned there. The state pages name the neighbours and say which have local taxes that a commuter would meet.

State withholding forms

Besides the federal W-4, 38 states have their own withholding certificate, and many still use allowances even though the federal form abandoned them in 2020. Alabama A-4, Arizona A-4, Arkansas AR4EC, California DE 4, Colorado DR 0004, Connecticut CT-W4, Delaware W-4 (Delaware), District of Columbia D-4, Georgia G-4, Hawaii HW-4, Idaho ID W-4, Illinois IL-W-4 and others. New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah rely on the federal W-4 or have a flat rate with no form. Leaving a state form blank makes your employer withhold at the default — usually single with no allowances — which over-withholds for most married workers. Each state page names its form.

Reading the map and the table

The tile map above puts every state in a fixed grid so that all 51 are the same size and readable at once: green tiles have no income tax on wages, light tiles charge a flat rate, grey tiles use brackets, and a blue outline marks the states where some city, county or school district taxes wages too. The figure inside each tile is the biweekly take-home for the salary and filing status you set, computed with that state's rules — it is not an estimate scaled from a national figure.

The table repeats the same numbers with three more columns: the state tax per paycheck, the take-home per year and the share of gross going to all taxes together. Click a column header to sort. Sorting by «all taxes» rather than by take-home is useful because it isolates the state effect from the size of the paycheck: two states can have the same percentage and different dollars simply because one has a bigger local line. And a caution on the no-tax states: they tie on the state column, but their local rules differ — Washington's Seattle payroll expense tax, for instance, is paid by employers rather than workers and does not appear here.

Change the filing status to see how the joint brackets move the ranking. Some states double their single brackets for joint filers, some do not, and a few — New Jersey is the clearest — give joint filers an extra bracket that a single filer never sees. Where a state's joint brackets have not been verified against the state's own publication, the state page says so and the engine falls back to the single schedule with a caveat rather than assuming.

Bonuses and supplemental pay by state

A bonus, a commission or severance paid separately is withheld federally at a flat 22% (37% above a million dollars in the year). What the state does varies: a group of states publish their own flat supplemental rate — California's 6.6% on bonuses and 10.23% on stock compensation is the best known — others require the aggregate method, where the bonus is added to a regular paycheck and withheld as if that were the new pay, and the no-tax states add nothing. Because the state rules are different documents from the income tax schedules, they live on separate pages: every state has a bonus tax calculator page that applies its rule, shows both federal methods and works out what comes back at filing.

The single most useful thing to know is that neither the federal 22% nor the state supplemental rate is your tax on the bonus. They are withholding shortcuts. The tax is your marginal rate, and for most people in the 12% or 22% federal bracket a bonus withheld at 22% plus a state supplemental rate over-withholds, which is why bonus months tend to end with a bigger refund.

State disability, paid leave and unemployment contributions

A few states take a further line from the employee's side of the paycheck that is not income tax: disability insurance and paid family leave. California's SDI, New Jersey's disability and family leave contributions, New York's disability and paid family leave, Rhode Island's temporary disability insurance and Hawaii's temporary disability insurance are the long-standing programmes; the newer paid family and medical leave schemes in Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Minnesota, Delaware, Maryland and the District of Columbia added employee contributions in the last few years, mostly a fraction of a percent of wages up to a cap.

They are small next to income tax — typically between 0.3% and 1.3% of wages — but they are real money on every paycheck and most calculators leave them out. This site lists them on the state pages where they exist and is adding them to the engine state by state, with the rate, the cap and the document it came from; until a state's contribution is loaded, its page says so in the «what this calculator does not do» box rather than silently omitting it. Unemployment insurance is almost always an employer-only cost; Alaska, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are the exceptions with a small employee share.

State minimum wages and hourly paychecks

The federal minimum wage is $7 an hour and has been since 2009; 31 states and DC set a higher one, several above $15, and a number of cities set their own above the state's. For an hourly worker the minimum wage is the floor of the whole calculation, so every state has an hourly paycheck calculator page with the state's 2026 minimum, its tipped minimum where one exists, and the overtime rules — daily overtime in California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado, weekly everywhere else. A full-time minimum-wage paycheck in each state, after tax, is the first example on each of those pages.

The 2026 federal deductions for overtime premium pay and tips matter most at these wages. Both are taken at filing, not on the paycheck, so an hourly worker's withholding stays the same while the refund grows; the hourly pages estimate the deduction from the hours and tips entered and show it in the withholding-versus-tax box.

How the 51 figures are computed

Each cell in the table is a full paycheck computation, not a percentage applied to a national figure. The federal side is the same in every state: the salary is divided into 26 paychecks, annualised back by the IRS percentage method with the 2026 standard withholding table for the filing status, and Social Security and Medicare are taken at their statutory rates. The state side then applies that state's rules to the annualised taxable wages — its standard deduction or none, its personal exemption or credit, its flat rate or its brackets — and divides the annual state tax back into paychecks. That is what a correctly completed state withholding form produces and it is the only method that puts all 51 on the same footing.

What it deliberately leaves out: local taxes (shown on the state pages instead), state disability and leave contributions (being added state by state), and state credits beyond the personal exemption. All three would make the table less comparable, not more, because they depend on the city, the employer or the family rather than on the state. The state pages add them back where they apply.

Every parameter the computation uses is listed on the state page with the document it was read from and the date. When a state's own publication disagreed with the compiled tables most calculators rely on, the state page says what the difference was; the methodology page keeps the full log.

Filing status across states

The filing status on your W-4 changes the federal deduction and brackets in every state, but how the state itself treats a joint return varies more than people expect. Some states double the single brackets and deduction for joint filers, which is the federal pattern; some keep the same brackets for everyone and simply give each spouse an exemption; a few have a distinct joint schedule with its own bracket boundaries. Change the filing status above the table and watch which states move: the ones that move most are the graduated states with true joint schedules, the ones that barely move are the flat states, and the no-tax states do not move at all except through the federal side.

Head of household is the status the state rules handle least uniformly — several states have no separate treatment for it at all and tax a head of household as a single filer — and married filing separately is generally the least favourable in both federal and state terms. The state pages say which schedule each status uses and whether the joint schedule has been verified against the state's own publication; where it has not, the engine uses the single schedule with a caveat rather than assuming the federal pattern.

How each state page is verified

40 of 51 state rule sets are checked against the state's own revenue department publication — the withholding guide, the rate schedule or the estimated-tax form — rather than a compiled table. In 12 states the compiled figures most calculators use were wrong and were corrected here: Arizona, California, Georgia, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi, Hawaii, Louisiana. The full log — document, date, what was found — is on the methodology page, and the state page's byline names the document it was checked against.

All 51 states and DC

Ranked by take-home on $85,000 for a single filer, every two weeks:

1. Alaska — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

2. Florida — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

3. Nevada — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

4. New Hampshire — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

5. South Dakota — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

6. Tennessee — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

7. Texas — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

8. Washington — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

9. Wyoming — $2,639.52 · no state tax · checked 2026-09-01

10. North Dakota — $2,624.20 · 3 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

11. Ohio — $2,581.08 · 2 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

12. Arizona — $2,577.12 · flat 2.50% · checked 2026-09-01

13. Louisiana — $2,555.87 · flat 3.00% · checked 2026-09-01

14. Indiana — $2,544.21 · flat 2.95% · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

15. Rhode Island — $2,540.65 · 3 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

16. Iowa — $2,540.36 · flat 3.80% · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

17. Pennsylvania — $2,539.15 · flat 3.07% · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

18. Mississippi — $2,536.90 · 2 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

19. New Mexico — $2,530.52 · 6 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

20. Kentucky — $2,529.62 · flat 3.50% · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

21. Utah — $2,529.56 · flat 4.50% · checked 2026-09-01

22. North Carolina — $2,528.64 · flat 3.99% · checked 2026-09-01

23. Nebraska — $2,524.60 · 3 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

24. South Carolina — $2,523.08 · 2 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

25. Colorado — $2,522.92 · flat 4.40% · checked 2026-09-01

26. Missouri — $2,521.92 · 8 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

27. Connecticut — $2,520.29 · 7 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

28. Arkansas — $2,520.20 · 2 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

29. Wisconsin — $2,519.35 · 4 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

30. Vermont — $2,518.37 · 4 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

31. West Virginia — $2,517.90 · 5 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

32. New Jersey — $2,515.50 · 7 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

33. Oklahoma — $2,513.39 · 4 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

34. Michigan — $2,510.22 · flat 4.25% · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

35. Montana — $2,507.15 · 2 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

36. Georgia — $2,499.42 · flat 4.99% · checked 2026-09-01

37. Idaho — $2,499.07 · flat 5.30% · checked 2026-09-01

38. California — $2,498.75 · 10 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

39. Maryland — $2,498.31 · 10 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

40. Kansas — $2,487.85 · 2 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

41. Alabama — $2,486.25 · 3 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

42. New York — $2,485.94 · 9 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

43. Massachusetts — $2,484.52 · 2 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

44. Illinois — $2,483.26 · flat 4.95% · checked 2026-09-01

45. Virginia — $2,482.85 · 4 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

46. District of Columbia — $2,475.81 · 7 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

47. Minnesota — $2,475.80 · 4 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

48. Delaware — $2,475.33 · 7 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

49. Maine — $2,463.30 · 3 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

50. Hawaii — $2,460.43 · 12 brackets · checked 2026-09-01

51. Oregon — $2,385.52 · 4 brackets · local taxes · checked 2026-09-01

A worked example: $85,000 in Florida, paid every two weeks

Take $85,000 a year in Florida, paid every two weeks (26 paychecks), single, standard W-4, no pre-tax deductions. The gross per paycheck is $3,269.23. Federal income tax withholding, from the 2026 Publication 15-T percentage method, takes $379.62. Social Security takes 6.2% of gross, $202.69, and Medicare 1.45%, $47.40. Florida withholds no income tax. The net deposit is $2,639.52, 80.7% of gross; over the year that is $68,628 from $85,000, an effective rate of 19.3% on all taxes together. Every line is reproducible from the documents on the sources page, and the table below lists them in the order they appear on a stub.

Two things on that stub are not obvious from the totals. First, the federal line is withholding, not tax: the tables annualise this paycheck as if all 26 were identical, and the year's actual tax, $9,870, differs from the $9,870 withheld by $0, which becomes a refund in April. Second, Social Security and Medicare are the same fraction of every paycheck of the year, because the salary is under the wage base, and no form can change them; only Section 125 deductions reduce their base. The reading guide walks each line and names what it should equal.

Nearby salaries: what $65,000 to $120,000 leave in Florida

A raise or a job offer is rarely at the round number on this page, so here is the ladder around it: the same every two weeks paycheck at 6 salaries from $65,000 to $120,000, single, standard W-4, no deductions. The effective rate climbs from 16.3% to 22.3% across the range because federal income tax is progressive while FICA is flat; each extra $10,000 of salary leaves less than the last, and the pay raise calculator prices any step exactly. The salary after tax pages carry the full range, one page per amount.

Reading the ladder the other way answers the interview question: to take home $10,000 more a year in Florida takes a raise of roughly $12,869 in gross at this level, because the new dollars are taxed at the marginal rate rather than the average. The state column stays at zero at every rung; the FICA column grows in a straight line until the wage base. The gross-up calculator runs the reverse computation for any net.

The same paycheck under each filing status

Filing status is the one W-4 line everyone fills in, and it moves the federal line more than most people expect. On $85,000 in Florida, paid every two weeks, a single filer is withheld $379.62 per paycheck; married filing jointly (one income) $224.62, because the joint table doubles the standard deduction to $32,200 and widens every bracket; head of household $267.23, with its $24,150 deduction and its own brackets. Married filing separately uses the single table. Florida has no state line to change. Picking «married» with two incomes and skipping step 2 is the commonest cause of an April bill; the W-4 guide covers the choice.

The last column shows why the status matters beyond the paycheck: the year's federal income tax on $85,000 is $9,870 single and $5,840 married filing jointly on one income, a difference of $4,030 that the W-4 status either delivers through the year or holds back for a refund. Head of household is the status most often missed by single parents, who leave $2,922 a year on the single table. FICA is identical in every row, since it has no status.