The 9 States With No Income Tax — And What You Actually Save
Nine states take no cut of your wages at the state level. On a $30-an-hour salary, that difference is worth somewhere between nothing and roughly $3,299 a year depending on where you would otherwise have lived — real money, but rarely the whole story.
The nine states
These states levy no income tax on wages. The cost-of-living index sets 100 as the national average, so a figure below 100 means the state is cheaper than average.
| State | Cost index | Median housing (monthly) | Median household income |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska | 127 | $1,350 | $77,790 |
| Florida | 103 | $1,600 | $67,917 |
| Nevada | 104 | $1,450 | $66,274 |
| New Hampshire | 113 | $1,500 | $83,449 |
| South Dakota | 92 | $950 | $63,920 |
| Tennessee | 90 | $1,150 | $59,695 |
| Texas | 92 | $1,350 | $67,321 |
| Washington | 110 | $1,700 | $82,228 |
| Wyoming | 92 | $1,050 | $65,003 |
Two of these deserve an asterisk. New Hampshire historically taxed interest and dividend income, though not wages, and that tax has now been phased out. Washington levies no wage tax but does tax certain long-term capital gains above a threshold. Neither affects a normal paycheck, but both matter if a meaningful share of your income comes from investments rather than wages.
What you would otherwise pay
To make the comparison concrete, here is the annual state income tax on the same $30-an-hour salary — $62,400 a year gross — in a range of states that do tax income, filing single with the standard deduction:
| State | Annual state tax | Share of gross |
|---|---|---|
| California | $1,937 | 3.1% |
| New York | $2,773 | 4.4% |
| Oregon | $4,886 | 7.8% |
| Hawaii | $3,299 | 5.3% |
| Ohio | $1,000 | 1.6% |
| Pennsylvania | $1,916 | 3.1% |
So the honest range on a $30-an-hour salary is roughly $1,916 to $3,299 a year. Meaningful — but an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in housing costs between those same states.
Why the headline number overstates it
States still need revenue. The ones that forgo income tax collect it somewhere else, and the alternatives tend to be less visible because they arrive in fragments rather than as a line on your pay stub.
Property tax is the usual substitute. Texas and New Hampshire both fund a large share of local government this way, and effective property tax rates in both rank among the highest in the country. If you own a home, a chunk of the income tax you avoided reappears as an annual property bill.
Sales tax is the other lever. Washington and Tennessee both run combined state-and-local sales tax rates near the top of the national range. Sales tax is regressive in effect — it takes a larger share of a small income than a large one — so the benefit of a no-income-tax state is not evenly distributed across earners.
Severance and tourism revenue explains the outliers. Alaska funds much of its budget from oil, and Nevada and Florida lean heavily on visitors. These are genuinely favourable arrangements for residents, which is why Alaska can pay a dividend rather than collect income tax.
Cost of living usually dominates
Compare the two effects at the same salary. Moving from a mid-tax state to a no-tax state might save you $1,000 a year in state tax. Moving from a state with $1,000 median monthly housing to one with $2,400 costs you $16,800 a year. Housing is simply the larger lever for most people.
This is why “move to a no-income-tax state” is sound advice in some pairings and poor advice in others. Texas and Florida combine no income tax with roughly average living costs, which is a genuine gain. Washington pairs no income tax with above-average costs, so the net position depends heavily on which city you land in and what you pay for housing.
The practical test
Rather than reasoning about it in the abstract, calculate the take-home pay you would have in each state and then subtract what housing actually costs there. The state tax line is easy to see and easy to overweight; the housing line is larger and easier to ignore until you are signing a lease.
You can run both sides of that comparison on any state page — each one shows take-home pay alongside median housing for that state, and the calculator's state-versus-state comparison puts two of them side by side.