Your ZIP Code Is Part of Your Financial Plan: How State Taxes Affect Retirement

A planner posted a result from his software in August 2026: moving a client from New York City to Florida raised the probability of retirement success in a Monte Carlo simulation by 10%. State taxes, he concluded, can be a serious drag.

He is right that the number is achievable. New York City is close to the worst case in the country and Florida is close to the best, and for a household with a large tax-deferred balance the gap compounds for decades. Run the same comparison in our calculator below with a couple retiring at 55 and the first year after the move saves $35,675 in state and city income tax.

What that framing leaves out is the part a household controls. For that same couple, moving five years earlier is worth another $278,735 in present value, and delaying the move until Social Security starts at 70 gives up $455,735 of the benefit. Those are one household’s numbers on assumptions set out in full further down, and yours will differ. The state you pick matters. When you arrive matters more, and almost nothing written about this topic says so.

Why a move like that can genuinely change the answer

New York’s top rates survived the 2025 budget and now run through 2032, at 9.65% above roughly $2.16 million of taxable income for a couple, 10.30% above $5 million, and 10.90% above $25 million.¹ New York City adds a resident income tax reaching 3.876%, stacked on the same taxable income.²

You will see 14.8% quoted as the combined top rate. It is arithmetically correct and practically misleading: 10.90% plus 3.876% is 14.776%, but the 10.90% bracket does not begin until $25 million of taxable income. The combined marginal rate a very high earner in Manhattan faces is 13.526%, and most people reading this are in the 6.85% state bracket plus 3.876% city, or about 10.7%.

One thing has changed recently in favor of the move. The federal deduction for state and local taxes used to give back a third or more of every dollar of state tax to a high earner who itemized. For 2026 the cap is $40,400, but it falls by 30 cents for every dollar of modified AGI above $505,000 and stops at a $10,000 floor, which it reaches at about $606,000 of income.³

That produces a result worth knowing before you model anything. Above roughly $606,000 of income, the SALT cap is pinned at $10,000 in every state, so a New Yorker and a Floridian with the same property tax bill get the same federal deduction. Moving forfeits nothing federally, because the federal government had already stopped sharing the cost of the state tax. In the middle band, between about $505,000 and $606,000, moving does cost you a real federal deduction, and our calculator nets that out rather than ignoring it. Both effects are visible if you change the wage input and watch the verdict text change.

What a 10% improvement in success probability tells you

Less than it appears. Start with the ambiguity: a 10% increase could mean 82% became 92%, or 82% became 90.2%. Those are different claims and the post does not distinguish them.

The metric itself is the deeper problem. David Blanchett’s 2023 work in the Financial Analysts Journal makes the case directly: a probability of success treats the outcome as binary and says nothing about the magnitude of a shortfall. In his illustration, a goal showing a 50% probability of success still delivered 90% of the goal on average.⁴ A plan that fails by running 4% short in the last two years and a plan that fails by running out at 78 score identically.

The inputs are softer than the output looks, too. Blanchett’s review of 31,211 financial plans found that about 70% assumed the client lived to exactly 90 and another 20% used 95, with little personalization.⁵ Change that one assumption and the probability moves without anything about the household changing at all.

None of this makes the planner’s result wrong. It makes it unquotable as a constant. The useful version of the question is how many dollars the move is worth, in what years, and how long it takes to repay what the move costs.

State tax is six separate taxes

The single number people compare, the top marginal income tax rate, describes one of six things that differ across state lines, and often not the one that decides the outcome.

1. Tax on earned income. This dominates the working years and is the layer the headline rate describes.
2. Tax on investment income. Interest, dividends, and realized gains. Most states fold long-term gains into ordinary income with no preferential rate, so a state that looks moderate on wages can be punishing in a year you sell something.
3. Tax on retirement income. The widest variation of the six, and the least discussed. Illinois exempts retirement income entirely. New York excludes $20,000 per person from age 59½, an amount unchanged since 1982. New Jersey excludes up to $100,000 for a couple and then takes all of it back above $150,000 of income. California taxes every dollar.
4. Property and sales taxes. No income tax is not the same as no taxes. NBER research covering all fifty states finds that states leaning on sales and property taxes have lower average burdens but more regressive ones, while income-tax states are higher on average and more progressive.⁶
5. The federal interaction. The SALT cap described above, which means a dollar of state tax saved is rarely a dollar of spendable wealth gained.
6. Estate tax. Frequently first-order for wealthy households even when income tax is not. New York’s 2026 exclusion is $7.35 million, with a cliff: above $7,717,500 the credit disappears and the entire estate is taxed rather than the excess.⁷ Washington, which has no income tax, has an estate tax with a $3 million exclusion for deaths on or after July 1, 2026.

Because these move independently, the best state for your working years, the best state for your retirement, and the best state to die in need not be the same place. That is also why you will not find a ranked list of retirement-friendly states here. A ranking has to assume an income mix, and the income mix is the whole question.

A few years decide more than a few decades

For most high earners the largest state tax bills of their life arrive in one or two years rather than spread evenly across thirty: selling a business, unwinding a concentrated position, a large vesting event, a carried interest distribution, or a decade of deliberately large Roth conversions in the gap between retiring and claiming Social Security.

Those years are also where behavior responds most. Studying California’s Proposition 30, which raised top rates by up to three percentage points, Rauh and Shyu found that an additional 0.8% of the top-bracket tax base left the state, but that the response among those who stayed was much larger: an elasticity of reported income of 2.5 to 3.2, eroding 60.9% of the expected revenue within two years, driven largely by that intensive margin rather than by migration.⁸ Departures accounted for about 9.5% of the total behavioral response.

Realizations respond to rates as well. Agersnap and Zidar, using state-level variation and deliberately netting migration out, estimate that capital gains realizations move enough that the revenue-maximizing rate sits somewhere around 38% to 47%.⁹ For a household, that makes when you realize a lever in its own right, one that interacts with where you live in the year you pull it.

Residency and sourcing are decided separately

Here is where do-it-yourself planning gets expensive. Changing your driver’s license in December does not make income earned earlier disappear from your old state’s tax base.

New York is the instructive case because it audits this aggressively. Abandoning a New York domicile requires clear and convincing evidence, a standard that comes from case law rather than a checklist.¹⁰ Separately from domicile, you are taxed as a resident anyway if you keep a permanent place of abode in the state and spend more than 183 days there, which means 184 days is the trigger and any part of a day counts as a day.¹¹ A permanent place of abode requires a genuine residential interest in the property, so the assumption that any vacation home automatically creates one has not held since Gaied.

Even after you are cleanly a nonresident, New York still taxes New York-source income: real property in the state, a business carried on there, New York S corporation income, and gambling winnings over $5,000. Intangible assets are excluded unless they are employed in a New York business.¹² Two traps deserve their own sentence. Days you work remotely for a New York employer generally count as New York days unless you work elsewhere out of your employer’s necessity rather than your own convenience.¹³ And stock option income is sourced by a workday fraction measured over the grant-to-vest period, so options granted while you worked in Manhattan stay partly taxable to New York however far away you exercise them.¹⁴

What federal law does protect

Retirement income is the exception, and it is a large one. Under 4 U.S.C. §114 no state may tax the retirement income of someone who is not a resident, and the statute’s definition covers qualified pensions, 401(k)-type plans, IRAs, 403(b)s, and governmental 457 plans. Because the statute defines a state to include its political subdivisions, the protection reaches city taxes too.¹⁵

Reading the statute, a Roth conversion is a distribution from an individual retirement plan, so conversion income taken after you have genuinely moved should fall inside the protection. We could not find an IRS ruling or a court decision addressing conversions specifically, so treat that as a reading of the text rather than settled authority, and get advice before betting a seven-figure conversion on it.

The carve-outs matter more than most summaries admit. Nonqualified deferred compensation is protected only when it is paid out over life expectancy or over at least ten years, so a lump sum or a nine-year payout is fully exposed to your former state. Stock options are not mentioned in the statute at all.

What the migration research found

The public argument about whether the rich flee taxes is noisier than the evidence, mostly because two literatures measure different things and get quoted as if they disagree.

Young, Varner, Lurie and Prisinzano examined 45 million tax records covering every million-dollar earner over 13 years and found tax-induced migration only “at the margins of statistical and socioeconomic significance.” The base rate is the number worth carrying: millionaires migrate at 2.4% a year against 2.9% for the general population. High earners are less mobile than average, not more. Their estimated elasticity of the millionaire population with respect to the tax rate is 0.1, and excluding Florida, interstate tax differentials showed no effect on millionaire migration at all.¹⁶

Moretti and Wilson, studying star scientists, report an elasticity of 1.8. Both numbers are right. Young measures the share of a state’s millionaire stock that leaves; Moretti and Wilson measure the net flow between a pair of states among a population selected for portability. Their own stock figure, 0.4% a year, sits much closer to Young’s.¹⁷

Kleven, Landais, Muñoz and Stantcheva, reviewing the field, caution against treating any of these as a portable constant: mobility elasticities “depend mechanically on the size of the tax jurisdiction,” and the estimates in their summary table range from 0.02 for Danish domestic workers to above 3 for superstar inventors.¹⁸ An elasticity estimated on professional golfers, who Agrawal and Tester show shift where they work toward low-tax states without moving house at all,¹⁹ tells you very little about a household with a mortgage and a thirteen-year-old.

There is a distinction hiding in all of this that gets lost constantly. A small aggregate elasticity is a statement about a population. Whether a particular 58-year-old couple with $8 million, a coming business sale, and no location-dependent income should relocate is a statement about one household. The first does not answer the second. Financial planning optimizes the household.

A worked example, with the assumptions on the table

A married couple, both 52, living in Manhattan. They earn $750,000, retire at 55, convert $250,000 a year from traditional to Roth between 55 and 70, then draw $200,000 a year plus $60,000 of Social Security. They realize $100,000 of long-term gains a year in retirement and collect $40,000 of interest and dividends throughout. Property tax is $30,000 in New York and $12,000 in Florida, they carry $20,000 of other itemized deductions, the move costs $75,000, and Florida costs $6,000 a year more in insurance and travel. Discounted at 4% real, through age 90.

The first year after a move at 55 saves $35,675, the move repays its $75,000 cost by age 56, and the lifetime difference is $726,725 in present value. Those are large numbers and they support the original post.

The row that is not in the original post is the third one. Waiting until 70 to move costs this couple $455,735, more than half the benefit, and the reason is entirely the conversion window. Fifteen years of $250,000 conversions either happen while New York and New York City can tax them or they do not. Nothing about the destination changed. Only the calendar did.

These figures come from the model above rather than from published research. We looked for work quantifying how state taxes affect withdrawal rates or portfolio longevity and found none; the economics literature studies whether people move, leaving the question of how moving changes a plan open. Treat any number attached to that question, ours included, as the output of a model that depends on its assumptions.

When the move is worth very little

Two cases from the same calculator, both of which a rankings table gets backwards.

A New Jersey retiree. A couple aged 62 living on $90,000 of withdrawals, $40,000 of Social Security, and $8,000 of dividends. New Jersey has a 10.75% top rate and a fearsome reputation. Their actual New Jersey income tax bill is $84 a year, because the pension exclusion covers a couple with income at or under $100,000 and New Jersey does not tax Social Security. Florida saves them $84. Everything else the model shows for that household is property tax and cost of living, which are real, but they are a housing decision wearing a tax costume.

An Illinois retiree. Illinois taxes retirement income at nothing at all: the subtraction on Form IL-1040 line 5 covers distributions from qualified plans and IRAs, explicitly including amounts converted to a Roth, with no age requirement.²⁰ A retiree drawing $140,000 a year in Illinois can run Roth conversions at zero state cost. Move them to a state with a 2.5% flat tax, which sounds like an improvement against Illinois’s 4.95%, and their state income tax rises from $1,485 to $4,250.

The pattern shows up in the research too. Conway and Rork, examining state tax breaks aimed at the elderly, find no consistent effect on elderly interstate migration.²¹ Retirees are the group most often assumed to be chasing tax rates, and the targeted breaks designed to attract them do not reliably move anyone.

The households for whom relocation is genuinely large share a profile: substantial income still to be taxed as ordinary income, a concentrated realization event ahead, a long conversion window, employment that is not tied to a place, or an estate near a state threshold. If your income in retirement will be modest and mostly sheltered, and your ties where you live are strong, this is a rounding error dressed up as a strategy.

Today’s tax map has an expiration date

A 40-year plan built on the 2026 code is false precision, and 2026 gave an unusually vivid demonstration.

Washington has been the standard recommendation for a high earner leaving California: no income tax, and close enough to keep a west-coast job. In March 2026 the governor signed ESSB 6346, which imposes a 9.90% tax on income above a $1,000,000 standard deduction beginning January 1, 2028, with first payments due in 2029. The deduction is $1,000,000 combined for a married couple regardless of how they file.²² Washington also already taxes long-term capital gains at 7%, rising to 9.9% above $1 million of gains, after a deduction of $278,000 that likewise does not double for couples.²³

Whether the income tax survives is unresolved. The state Supreme Court upheld the capital gains tax in 2023 by classifying it as an excise on a transaction and expressly declining to revisit Culliton v. Chase, the 1933 decision holding that income is property and must be taxed uniformly. A tax on the receipt of income is a harder fit for that reasoning, and the legislature wrote into the act that the department should implement it “regardless of litigation.” Our calculator does not model this tax, because the $1 million deduction means most households owe nothing under it and its legal status is genuinely uncertain, but a Washington entry that pretended nothing had changed would be wrong.

Two more expiry dates worth holding: the federal SALT cap carries a 1% annual escalator through 2029 and then reverts to $10,000 in 2030, and New York’s top brackets are scheduled to fall back to 8.82% in 2033. Tax-law forecasts do not deserve the confidence you give a contractual cash flow.

How to put a number on it

Five steps, in the order that makes the later ones easier.

Start from last year’s return. Find what you actually paid in state and local income tax and which income produced it. Multiplying gross income by the top marginal rate overstates the answer for almost everyone.

Map your income by phase. Remaining working years, the conversion window between retiring and claiming Social Security, the Social Security and required-distribution years, any single large realization, and the surviving-spouse years, when a widow or widower files single on a similar income. The value of moving changes sharply between these, and the calculator above is organized around exactly this split.

Compare total incremental cash flow. The economic value of relocating is the present value of the lifetime tax difference, minus moving costs, minus the difference in housing, insurance, healthcare and travel, minus any income you give up, minus whatever you would pay to keep living near the people you live near. Put a real number on that last term. The embeddedness finding in the migration literature, that 90% of millionaires are married and half have children at home, is evidence that location carries large private value.

Run scenarios rather than a forecast. At minimum: stay; move at retirement; move before the large realization; spending 10% higher and lower; and a bad sequence of returns in the first five years.

Report more than one number. Alongside any change in success probability, look at lifetime tax paid, median and 10th percentile terminal wealth, the size of the shortfall in the paths that fail, and the break-even year for the move.

And there is a line past which this stops being a do-it-yourself exercise. If the decision involves a business sale, a partnership interest, deferred compensation, options or restricted stock, trusts, multiple homes, or an estate near a state threshold, pay for a CPA and, where sourcing is in question, a state tax attorney. A five-figure fee is rational insurance against a six-figure sourcing mistake, and residency audits in New York and California are not rare events.

Frequently asked questions

Can my old state tax my 401(k) withdrawals after I move?

No, provided you have genuinely established residency elsewhere. 4 U.S.C. §114 prohibits a state from taxing the retirement income of a nonresident, and the definition covers qualified plans, 401(k)s, IRAs, 403(b)s, and governmental 457 plans. The protection extends to city taxes because the statute defines a state to include its political subdivisions. It does not cover a lump-sum payout of nonqualified deferred compensation, or a payout stream shorter than ten years, or stock options.

Should I do my Roth conversions before or after I move?

Usually after, when you are moving from a high-tax state to a low-tax one, and the amount at stake is often larger than every other part of the decision combined. In our worked example, fifteen years of conversions taxed in New York rather than Florida accounted for $455,735 of present value. The countervailing reasons to convert sooner are federal: filling lower federal brackets before required distributions start, and managing Medicare premium surcharges. Those are federal considerations and they do not disappear when you move, so the answer is a joint decision about retirement date, move date, and conversion size rather than three separate ones.

How many days can I spend in my old state?

In New York, if you keep a permanent place of abode there, 183 days is the limit and the 184th day makes you a statutory resident regardless of where you are domiciled. Any part of a day counts as a full day, so a connecting flight can cost you. Other states use similar rules with different specifics. If you are going to keep a home in the state you left, keep a contemporaneous day log.

Does moving help if most of my money is in retirement accounts?

Less than you would think, and the reason is a good one. Money inside a traditional account is not taxed by any state until you withdraw it, and once you withdraw it your new state has the taxing right. So the benefit arrives gradually across your withdrawal years rather than immediately, which is why the break-even year in the calculator moves out sharply when you delay the move. If most of your wealth is in a Roth, the state income tax question is close to moot and the property and estate layers are what remain.

Is a state with no income tax always cheaper overall?

No. States without an income tax raise revenue through property and sales taxes instead, and NBER work across all fifty states finds those systems have lower average burdens but distribute them more regressively. Washington charges 7% to 9.9% on large realized capital gains and has a $3 million estate tax exclusion. Florida property insurance has risen enough to offset a meaningful share of the income tax saving for some households. Compare total cash out the door, which is what the property tax and cost inputs in the calculator are for.

What if I keep working remotely for an employer in my old state?

Then the plan may not work at all. New York applies a convenience of the employer rule: days you work outside New York for a New York employer count as New York days unless you are working elsewhere because your employer needs you to be, not because you prefer it. Working from your new home for your own convenience does not qualify. Our calculator assumes wages follow you, which is the assumption to check hardest if you are moving before you stop working.

Key takeaways

• The timing of a move is often worth more than the choice of destination. In our worked example, delaying a New York to Florida move from 55 to 70 gave up $455,735 of present value, more than half the total benefit, entirely because of when the Roth conversions happened.
• The headline rate describes one of six layers. Earned income, investment income, retirement income, property and sales, the federal SALT interaction, and estate tax all move independently, and the best state for each need not be the same state.
• Retirement income follows your residence, and almost nothing else does. 4 U.S.C. §114 protects qualified plan and IRA distributions from your former state. Wages for work performed there, business income, short-dated deferred compensation, and stock option spreads stay taxable to it.
• High earners are less mobile than the general population, not more. Millionaires migrate at 2.4% a year against 2.9% for everyone else, and outside Florida, interstate tax differentials showed no measurable effect on millionaire migration.
• A low rate on income your state already exempts saves you nothing. A New Jersey couple drawing $90,000 pays $84 a year in state income tax, and an Illinois retiree moving to a 2.5% flat-tax state sees their bill rise.
• Above about $606,000 of income, the SALT cap is at its $10,000 floor everywhere. The federal government has already stopped sharing the cost of your state tax, so moving forfeits no federal deduction. Between $505,000 and $606,000 it does, and that has to be netted out.
• Today’s map expires. Washington enacted a 9.90% income tax in 2026 that begins in 2028 and is being litigated, the federal SALT cap reverts to $10,000 in 2030, and New York’s top brackets fall in 2033.

Related guides

• Roth Conversion Ladder: the conversion window this guide keeps pointing at, with the five-year clocks mapped out.
• Tax-Aware Decumulation: withdrawal sequencing for high earners, which state residency sits on top of.
• Roth vs. Traditional 401(k) and IRA: the break-even retirement tax rate, where your state rate is one term.
• Monte Carlo Retirement Simulation: what a probability of success is computed from, and what it leaves out.
• Safe Withdrawal Rate: why the gross withdrawal you need is larger than the spending you plan.
• High Income Is Not Wealth: the household this guide is addressed to, earlier in its arc.
• Should H-1B Visa Holders Contribute to a 401(k)?: the same source-tax statute applied across a national border rather than a state line.

Sources and method

1. New York State Senate, N.Y. Tax Law §601. The 2026 schedule also lowered the bottom and middle rates, so 4.00% became 3.90% and 6.00% became 5.90%. A rate table copied from 2025 is stale.
2. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Form IT-2105-I (2026), state and New York City rate schedules. The 4.25% figure that appears in withholding tables is a withholding convention with a cushion, not the statutory marginal rate.
3. IRC §164(b)(6) as amended by P.L. 119-21; IRS, correction to the state and local income tax deduction amount in the 2026 Form 1040-ES. $40,400 for 2026, reduced by 30% of MAGI over $505,000, floor $10,000, same threshold for single and joint filers.
4. David Blanchett, “Rethinking Retirement Planning Outcome Metrics”, CFA Institute, April 2023, drawing on “Redefining the Optimal Retirement Income Strategy,” Financial Analysts Journal 79(1), 2023. The 50%-success, 90%-of-goal figure is a simplified illustration rather than a plan simulation.
5. David Blanchett, “How to Estimate ‘The End’ of Retirement”, Journal of Financial Planning, August 2021. Review of 31,211 plans.
6. Fleck, Heathcote, Storesletten and Violante, “Fiscal Progressivity of the U.S. Federal and State Governments”, NBER Working Paper 33385, January 2025. The same paper finds regressive states attract more inter-state net migration, especially of high-income migrants.
7. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, estate tax; N.Y. Tax Law §952. Basic exclusion $7,350,000 for deaths in 2026; the credit phases out completely above 105% of that amount.
8. Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu, “Behavioral Responses to State Income Taxation of High Earners: Evidence from California”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 16(1), 2024.
9. Ole Agersnap and Owen Zidar, “The Tax Elasticity of Capital Gains and Revenue-Maximizing Rates”, AER: Insights 3(4), 2021. Migration effects are netted out of these estimates, so the paper speaks to realization timing rather than to relocation.
10. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Nonresident Audit Guidelines, December 2021. The clear and convincing standard derives from Matter of Newcomb, 192 N.Y. 238.
11. N.Y. Tax Law §605. The statute reads “more than 183 days.” On the residential interest requirement see Gaied v. New York State Tax Appeals Tribunal, 22 N.Y.3d 592 (2014).
12. N.Y. Tax Law §631, New York source income of a nonresident individual.
13. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, TSB-M-06(5)I, the convenience of the employer test.
14. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, TSB-M-07(7)I. The grant-to-vest allocation period superseded the earlier grant-to-exercise approach; sources describing the latter are out of date.
15. 4 U.S.C. §114, enacted by P.L. 104-95. The enumerated list is at subsection (b)(1)(A) through (I); subsection (b)(3) defines a state to include its political subdivisions.
16. Cristobal Young, Charles Varner, Ithai Z. Lurie and Richard Prisinzano, “Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite”, American Sociological Review 81(3), 2016. See also Young and Lurie, “Taxing the Rich: How Incentives and Embeddedness Shape Millionaire Tax Flight,” American Journal of Sociology 131(2), 2025, for the embeddedness evidence.
17. Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson, “The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists”, American Economic Review 107(7), 2017. The 1.8 elasticity applies to the net flow between a state pair; the corresponding stock effect is 0.4% a year.
18. Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Mathilde Muñoz and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(2), 2020.
19. David R. Agrawal and Kenneth Tester, “State Taxation of Nonresident Income and the Location of Work”, AEJ: Economic Policy 16(1), 2024. The golfers shift where they work without changing residence.
20. Illinois Department of Revenue, Publication 120, Retirement Income (R-12/25). The subtraction covers “an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) (including amounts rolled over to a Roth IRA),” and the publication separately lists converting a traditional IRA to a Roth in its required-attachments table. Statutory basis at 35 ILCS 5/203(a)(2)(F).
21. Karen Smith Conway and Jonathan C. Rork, on the consequences of state tax preferential treatment of the elderly, National Tax Association. See also Brewer, Conway and Rork, Public Finance Review, 2017.
22. Washington State Legislature, ESSB 6346, Chapter 238, Laws of 2026, enrolled text. Section 201 imposes the tax; section 314 sets the $1,000,000 standard deduction, combined for spouses; section 205 credits Washington capital gains tax paid. Approved by the governor March 30, 2026. See also Washington DOR, income tax.
23. RCW 82.87.040 and 82.87.060. The tiered 7% and 9.9% structure came from ESSB 5813, Chapter 421, Laws of 2025. The $278,000 standard deduction is the 2025 indexed amount; the 2026 figure is due by October 31, 2026. Gains inside retirement accounts and on real estate are exempt under RCW 82.87.050.

Method. The calculator applies published 2026 bracket schedules for New York, New York City, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, Minnesota and Washington, and 2025 schedules for California, whose indexed 2026 figures were not published when this was written, and New Jersey, whose rates are statutory and unindexed. Every jurisdiction carries its source and review date in the code. Federal tax is held constant between the two scenarios except for the SALT deduction. Figures are in today’s dollars with no inflation on income or brackets, so the discount rate is a real rate. Dollar results quoted above are outputs of that model on the stated assumptions rather than published research findings.

Editor’s note

Educational content, not tax, legal, or investment advice, and not a recommendation to relocate. Residency and income sourcing are fact-specific and consequential; get professional advice before acting. While researching this guide we found a widely repeated claim that research at a large asset manager showed state tax optimization improves after-tax retirement outcomes by 5% to 15%. We could not locate the paper it cites, and the author’s own publication record contains no such study, so we have not used it. Citations verified against primary sources on August 13, 2026.