Compare Take-Home Pay by State

Yes, and that is the main thing it does that most comparison tools do not. Seven states have localities with their own income tax on wages, and where the calculator has a confirmed rate it offers a dropdown for it. If your city is not listed, there is an option to type your own rate rather than the tool guessing one for you.

On a $75,000 salary filing single, Texas leaves you about $61,593 a year against roughly $57,843 in California, a difference of around $3,750 a year or $144 per biweekly paycheck. Two things make up that gap: $2,775 of California income tax, calculated from the state's real nine-bracket schedule rather than a rough average, and $975 of SDI, the disability insurance withholding that comes off every California paycheck at 1.3% with no wage ceiling. Most comparison tools leave the second one out entirely.

Because local rates are large enough to move you across the national ranking on their own. At $75,000, Pennsylvania sits around 15th of the 50 states for take-home pay. A Philadelphia resident on that same salary ends up 50th, with only Oregon coming out lower, and that is entirely down to the city wage tax. A comparison that stops at the state line puts Pennsylvania comfortably mid-table and never shows you the part that changed the answer.

The calculator covers 7 of them: Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Indiana. Maryland is the broadest, where all 23 counties and Baltimore City charge a county tax based on where you live. Ohio and Pennsylvania have hundreds of municipalities each, so the calculator lists the largest ones and lets you type a rate for anywhere else. A handful of other states have narrow local taxes that rarely touch wages, and those are left out on purpose.

It depends on the state, and each result tells you which case it is. The federal side uses the exact 2026 brackets, standard deduction and Social Security wage base. States with a flat tax get their exact statutory rate. California, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York are calculated from their full published schedules, each with its own standard deduction and personal exemption, and the result shows the effective rate that produces. New York also carries its benefit recapture above $107,650. The remaining graduated states still use a single stand-in rate chosen to approximate a middle income, and those are labelled an estimate with the real bracket range next to them. Local rates come from the county or city that publishes them. New York City is the one locality calculated from a real schedule rather than a single rate, because applying its 3.876% top rate to gross pay overstates the bill by $500 to $1,500 a year.

Run both sides through the comparison and look at the annual figures rather than the percentages. A raise usually beats a tax difference: moving from a 5% state to a no-tax state on $75,000 saves you a few thousand a year, which a 10% raise clears on its own. What tends to matter more than either is the cost of housing where you land, and no paycheck calculator can tell you that.

No, and it says so on the table itself. A ranking has one row per state, and a state does not have a single local rate. Ohio alone has hundreds of municipal rates that run from nothing to well over 2%. The ranking is there to answer the broad question of which states are cheaper. Once you know which two places you are actually choosing between, the comparison at the top of the page is the accurate one.

Several cities tax people who work inside the boundary as well as people who live there, usually at a lower rate. Philadelphia and Detroit both have separate resident and non-resident rates, and both are in the dropdown. Kansas City and St. Louis charge their 1% earnings tax either way. If you commute into a city not listed, pick the custom rate option and enter the non-resident rate your employer withholds.

Not yet. This tool compares gross salary against tax, so payroll deductions are left out. Since those deductions are the same wherever you live, they lower both sides of a comparison by a similar amount and rarely change which place comes out ahead. For a full paycheck breakdown with pre-tax and post-tax deductions, use the main paycheck calculator.

The share of your gross salary that goes to tax once everything is added up: federal income tax, state tax, local tax, Social Security and Medicare. It is always lower than your top federal bracket, because only the last slice of your income is taxed at that rate. Comparing effective rates across two places tells you the same thing as comparing the dollar figures, just in a form that stays useful if your salary changes.