The 9 states where your paycheck math is simple

Most take-home calculators end on a caveat: this is federal only, and your state will want its own cut. In forty-one states that caveat is doing real work. In nine of them it is doing none, because there is no state layer to add. The list is short enough to memorize, and two entries on it need a longer sentence than the headline gives them.

What comes out anyway

Losing the state layer does not leave you holding your gross. FICA is federal and identical in all fifty states. Social Security takes 6.2% of wages up to the $184,500 base for 2026, a maximum of $11,439, and Medicare takes 1.45% of every dollar with another 0.9% above $200,000.

On a $100,000 salary in any of the nine, federal income tax comes to $13,170 and FICA to $7,650, which leaves $79,180 for the year — $6,598 a month, or $3,045 every two weeks. That is an effective rate of 20.8% in a state that taxes none of it. The number is worth sitting with before you treat a no-income-tax move as a raise.

Two of the nine still deduct something

Neither deduction is an income tax, and neither is large, but both mean the phrase "nothing but federal comes out" needs qualifying in two places.

• Washington

  Washington does deduct small employee premiums for Paid Family and Medical Leave and for the WA Cares long-term care program. Those are payroll premiums rather than an income tax, and they are not in the table below.

• Alaska

  Alaska is one of the few states where employees contribute to state unemployment insurance through a small payroll deduction. It is not an income tax and is not in the table below.

The two that get described wrongly

The capital gains tax enacted in 2021 is the exception worth knowing about: it reaches certain long-term capital gains above an annual threshold and it is not a wage tax, so a salaried paycheck is untouched by it. If you sell appreciated assets while a Washington resident, that is a separate question from the table below.

New Hampshire never taxed wages, and the separate tax on interest and dividend income is now gone as well — it was phased out and no longer applies as of 2025. There is also no general sales tax, so local property tax carries an unusually large share of the load; the trade-off shows up in your housing cost rather than your paycheck.

Cheaper is a separate question

What these nine share is where the bill arrives, not how big it is. Texas bars a state property tax in the same constitution that bars the income tax, so an identical house is assessed differently one school district over. Alaska has no statewide sales tax, but its boroughs and cities levy their own. New Hampshire has no general sales tax at all, which leaves local property tax carrying an unusually large share.

None of that shows up in a paycheck, which is exactly the problem with deciding a move on withholding alone. A calculator that stops at "no income tax" has answered the easy half of the question and left the half that depends on what you buy and where you live.

Because none of the nine touch wages, take-home is identical across all of them at any given salary — $100,000 pays the same in Dallas, Miami, and Cheyenne. The per-state pages carry the full $40,000–$300,000 table and what each state collects instead.

※ Single filer, standard deduction of $16,100, W-2 wages only, no 401(k) or HSA contributions. Estimates for planning, not tax advice.