CA, NY, TX, FL, WA —
what your income tax actually looks like.

Field guide

How each state's income tax actually computes.

Headline "top rate" comparisons between states are misleading on their own — what actually matters is where your specific income falls across each state's bracket structure, and whether any local add-ons or surcharges apply. Here's exactly how each of the five states in this comparison is modeled.

California: 9 brackets, plus a real surcharge quirk

California runs 9 progressive brackets from 1% up to 12.3%, verified directly against the Franchise Tax Board's own published rate schedules for both single and married-filing- jointly filers (their thresholds aren't a clean doubling of each other — verified bracket by bracket, not assumed). On top of that sits a separate 1% Mental Health Services Tax surcharge on taxable income above $1,000,000 — and that threshold is flat across every filing status, including married filing jointly, unlike every regular CA bracket. That's the source of the commonly-cited 13.3% top effective rate, the highest in the nation.

New York: a real 2026 rate cut, and a resolved ambiguity

New York also runs 9 progressive brackets, from 3.9% up to 10.9%. The 3.9% bottom rate is a genuine 2026 change — the state's FY2026 budget cut each of the bottom six brackets by 0.1 percentage point, verified directly against the state tax department's own official 2026 withholding-methods publication rather than a secondary summary. Three "millionaire brackets" (9.65%, 10.3%, 10.9%) apply above roughly $1.08M for single filers and $2.16M for joint filers — and the exact split point between the 9.65% and 10.3% bands, which wasn't reliably documented in casual summaries, is confirmed here at exactly $5,000,000 for both filing statuses, traced directly to the same official publication's high-earner withholding method.

NYC: a genuinely separate local tax

If you live in New York City (not just work there), a separate local income tax applies on top of state tax — 4 brackets running 3.078% to 3.876%. It's not a rounding error: on $100,000 of taxable income as a single filer, this calculator computes roughly $5,330 in state tax and roughly $3,750 in NYC tax, a combined effective rate just over 9%. Toggle NYC residency on to include it.

Texas, Florida, Washington: genuinely $0

All three have no state income tax at all — there's nothing to calculate. They're included specifically so the comparison is honest about what "no income tax" actually looks like next to California and New York's real numbers, rather than presented as an unqualified win on its own.

Scope

This tool treats your entered income as taxable income directly — it doesn't model standard deductions, exemptions, or federal tax, and only single and married-filing-jointly are modeled. It's a side-by-side state income tax comparison, not a full return estimator. In practice this means the combined NY + NYC figure will typically run a bit higher than numbers you might see elsewhere for the same income, since those often subtract standard deductions first — on $100,000 single-filer income, for example, this tool computes roughly $9,080 combined vs. the roughly $8,875 sometimes cited after deductions.

Disclaimer

This calculator is for informational planning purposes only and does not constitute tax advice. Consult a tax professional for your specific relocation or filing situation.