Nine U.S. states don’t tax wage or salary income at all for 2026:
- Alaska
- Florida
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Washington
- Wyoming
If you work in one of these, the “state income tax” line on your pay stub should read $0 — and on this calculator, that’s the one case where state tax is labeled Exact, not Estimated, because there’s nothing to estimate. See Is This Paycheck Calculator Actually Accurate? for what Exact and Estimated mean everywhere else.
What “no income tax” doesn’t mean
Living or working in one of these states doesn’t mean your paycheck is untouched. Federal income tax and FICA (Social Security and Medicare) still apply exactly the same as anywhere else in the country — those are federal, not state, taxes. A no-income-tax state only zeroes out one specific line, not the whole paycheck.
It’s also worth being precise about New Hampshire specifically: it used to tax interest and dividend income (not wages), separately from a wage income tax it never had. That interest/dividends tax was fully phased out by 2025, so as of 2026, New Hampshire has no state-level tax on wage income, matching the other eight states on this list.
The tradeoff nobody puts on the list
States don’t run on nothing — the nine states above fund government through other means: sales tax, property tax, excise taxes, or in a few cases (Alaska, Texas) resource revenue like oil. “No income tax” is a genuine paycheck advantage, but it’s not the same as “no taxes” — it just moves where the tax burden shows up.
Why this matters for comparing job offers
A $75,000 salary in Texas and a $75,000 salary in a state with, say, a 5% effective income tax rate are not the same offer in take-home terms — that’s roughly a $3,750/year difference before even accounting for cost of living. If you’re comparing offers across states, the Paycheck Calculator will show you the actual take-home difference, not just the headline salary.