The average American paid $1,613 in state income taxes in 2022. Depending on which state you live in, you might be paying more, less, or nothing at all.
What is state income tax?
States collected state income taxes from residents annually. These are separate from federal income taxes, which are paid to the federal government.
States commonly use income tax revenue to fund services and programs for:
- Education: supporting K–12 (teacher and administrator salaries) and higher education (state community colleges and universities)
- Healthcare: operating state-specific initiatives and state-administered programs like Medicaid
- Corrections: building, maintaining, and operating state prison systems
- Transportation and infrastructure: building and maintaining roadways, bridges, airports, and public transit systems
- Public assistance: providing cash or benefits to individuals or families, including childcare services, transitional housing, and job training
The amount of state income tax someone owes depends on their income level and their state’s tax rate. Some states have a flat tax rate, so everyone pays the same percentage of their income in taxes no matter how much they earn. Other states have a progressive tax rate, meaning that people who earn more pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes.
And other some states have no income tax at all.
Which states have no income tax?
As of 2025, there are nine states that don’t collect any state income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Two of these are recent additions to the list; New Hampshire repealed its state income tax effective January 1, 2025, and Tennessee repealed state income tax in 2021.
Instead of levying income taxes, these states collect tax revenue from other sources like property taxes, sales tax, and motor vehicle licensing taxes.
Where do people pay the highest state income taxes?
In 2022, people paying the highest average state income tax per person were:
- New Yorkers, who paid an average of$4,460.80 per person
- Californians, at $3,734.82
- Bay Staters (i.e., people from Massachusetts), at $3,474.55
The highest average per-person local income tax in the nation was collected in Washington, DC: $4,605.99 per person.
Aside from people living in no-tax states, the lowest average taxes in 2022 were paid in:
- Tennessee, at $1.34 per person
- New Hampshire ($109.99)
- North Dakota ($605.49)
- Mississippi ($862.62)
- Louisiana ($974.97)
Residents in all other states paid an average of $1,000 or more in state income taxes.
Which states have the highest income tax burden?
Income tax burden is a separate but related way to evaluate how much tax someone pays: it measures the share of a person’s income paid in state income taxes.
Tax burdens in 2022 were highest in New York, where the average resident paid 5.8% of their personal income to state income taxes. California was second (4.9%), and Washington, DC, was third (4.6%).
Which states have the lowest income burden?
Among the income-tax collecting states, New Hampshire had the lowest income tax burden in 2022. In 2022, the average New Hampshirite paid just $110 — or 0.1% of their income — in state income taxes. North Dakota was the only other state with a tax burden of less than 1% at $605 per person, or a tax burden of 0.8%.
Five other states — Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma — had tax burdens between 1.0% and 2.0%. The remaining 36 states had tax burdens of 2.0% or higher.
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Page sources and methodology
All of the data on the page was sourced directly from government agencies. The analysis and final review was performed by USAFacts.
Census Bureau
2022 State & Local Government Finance Historical Datasets and Tables
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Regional Data: GDP and Personal Income
