State Tax Burden Calculator: Income, Property, Sales (2026)

Most state comparisons quietly answer the wrong question. A ranking of income tax rates favors Texas and Florida; a ranking of property taxes favors Colorado and the South; a ranking of sales taxes favors the Northeast. Your burden is the sum of all three applied to your specific income, home, and spending, and the winner changes with the household.

The calculator above lets you set income, home value, and spending assumptions and compare among eleven states. This guide supplies the 2026 layer-by-layer data behind it and the rules of thumb for reading the output: high earners who rent are dominated by the income layer; owners of expensive homes in modest-income years are dominated by the property layer; and almost nobody is dominated by the sales layer, though it is the most visible tax in daily life.

For 2026, the eleven states in the calculator span the whole national range: two with no income tax, five flat-tax states after Ohio’s and Georgia’s conversions, and four graduated states topping out between 6.85% and 13.3% at the state level before local add-ons.

Local income taxes belong in this layer where they exist: New York City residents add up to 3.876%, Philadelphia residents 3.74% (through mid-2026 pay dates), and Ohio cities up to about 3%. Illinois, North Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida have no local wage income taxes.

Property tax is levied locally everywhere, so state comparisons use effective rates: tax paid as a share of owner-occupied home value. Per Tax Foundation calculations from 2023 Census data, New Jersey leads the nation at 2.23% and Illinois is second at 2.07%, while Colorado sits near the bottom at 0.49%. Texas ranks in the higher tier nationally, which is precisely how it affords zero income tax.

Two mechanics matter beyond the rate. Homestead exemptions and assessment caps (Florida’s Save Our Homes, Texas homestead caps) favor long-tenured owners over new buyers, so the effective rate you would actually pay after a move exceeds the state average. And no state has zero property tax; every state plus DC shows a nonzero effective rate.

As of July 1, 2026, the population-weighted average combined state and local sales tax nationally is 7.53% per Tax Foundation data. Among the calculator’s eleven states, combined averages run from 6.34% in Pennsylvania and 6.60% in New Jersey up to 8.98% in Illinois and 9.03% in California, with Texas at 8.20%, New York at 8.54%, and Florida at 6.98%.

Sales tax burden scales with taxable spending, not income, so its share of a high earner’s total burden is small: a household spending $60,000 per year on taxable goods faces a spread of only about $1,600 per year between the cheapest and most expensive states in this set. It breaks ties; it does not decide moves.

Exemption bases matter more than headline rates at the margins: most states exempt or reduce-rate groceries and prescription drugs, so effective sales tax on a real household budget runs below the posted combined rate everywhere. Treat the sales column as a rough ordering, not a bill.

The table below puts the three layers next to each other for every state in the calculator. Income structures are tax year 2026 per state revenue departments. Property figures are effective rates on owner-occupied housing from 2023 Census ACS data as computed by the Tax Foundation (published 2025); where the verified figure is a band or tier rather than a point estimate, the table says so instead of inventing precision. Sales figures are combined state plus average local rates as of July 1, 2026, from the Tax Foundation midyear survey.

Read down the columns and the funding models jump out. New Jersey and Illinois pair meaningful income taxes with the two highest property tax rates in the country. Texas funds its zero income tax with high-tier property taxes and an above-average sales rate. Colorado is the quiet outlier: a middling flat income tax, one of the lowest property rates anywhere, and midrange sales tax. Florida is the most balanced of the no-tax pair. No column has one state at the top of all three.

High income, renting: the income layer dominates and the no-tax states win by the full income-tax amount, tens of thousands annually at high incomes. This is the profile for which the Florida and Texas moves genuinely pay.

High home value relative to income: the property layer can dominate. A $400,000 earner in a $2 million house pays more property tax in Texas than income tax in North Carolina, and the ranking inverts. Retirees drawing modest taxable income from a paid-off expensive home are the extreme case, which is why state retirement-tax treatment gets its own analysis.

The calculator deliberately ignores several things a CPA would layer on: local income taxes below the state line (Ohio cities, Philadelphia), retirement income exclusions, business apportionment for owners, estate and inheritance taxes, and the one-time cost of the move itself including trailing-income tax. Treat the output as the first sort, not the answer.

The calculator answers a screening question. Three situations deserve the full version. Households actively planning a move within the next eighteen months, where the projection adds the pieces the screen omits: the exit-state part-year return, trailing equity and bonus allocations, statutory-residency day counts, and the property tax bill on the specific house rather than the state average. Business owners, because entity income follows apportionment and nexus rules that can leave most of the profit taxable in the old state regardless of where the owner sleeps. And physicians or consultants choosing a base state for a multi-state practice, where the home state’s rate sets the credit cap on every future assignment.

A realistic scenario: a dual-physician couple in Chicago, $700,000 of combined income, weighing Nashville and Denver. The screen says Tennessee wins on income tax. The projection adds what the screen cannot see: their Illinois home would sell into a 2.07% effective-rate market while Nashville property sits on a 9.61% combined sales-tax base, one spouse’s hospital system has no Tennessee presence so her income might keep Illinois sourcing for a transition year, and Colorado’s 0.49% property rate partially offsets its 4.4% income tax for the house they would actually buy. The right answer survived the projection; the margin shrank by half. That is typical, and it is exactly what you want to know before the moving truck.