estimatetax/us-tax-cost-of-living-relocation

US state and local tax, cost of living, and relocation comparisons (2026 tax year)

Three datasets behind estimatetax.net, published so the figures can be checked, reused and cited rather than taken on trust.

Files

condados.csv — 3132 county effective property tax rates

The effective property tax rate for every US county and county-equivalent with a published rate, derived from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. division_type records what that state calls the unit — Louisiana has parishes, Alaska boroughs and census areas — because calling them all counties is wrong and a common error in datasets of this kind.

precios.csv — price level for 51 jurisdictions, split into components

The Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024, where 100 is the national average, broken into all items, goods, housing, utilities and other services. Reproduced unchanged from the BEA release; included so the third file is self-contained.

comparativas.csv — all 1275 state pairs, resolved

This is the part that does not exist elsewhere. Every combination of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, computed on a $100,000 salary with a $400,000 home at each state's median local property tax rate: federal tax, FICA, state income tax, local income tax, property tax, take-home, and take-home divided by the price level — purchasing power.

The column that motivated publishing this is headline_and_real_disagree. It is true where the take-home figure and the purchasing-power figure name different states, meaning a reader following a tax calculator would move in the wrong direction.

It is true for 324 of the 1275 pairs — one in four. It is not evenly spread: 30 of Washington's 50 comparisons contradict each other and none of New York's do.

Method

Federal brackets, the standard deduction and FICA come from the IRS revenue procedure. State income tax rules were read one state at a time from each state's own department of revenue rather than from a compilation. Local income tax covers the eleven states where counties, cities or school districts levy their own, assembled from state comptroller files, municipal registers and school district schedules. Property tax is the county effective rate from the Census. Cost of living is the BEA Regional Price Parity — an official index with a published methodology, deliberately not a crowd-sourced database, which is most of why these figures differ from other comparisons.

Purchasing power is take-home after all five taxes divided by the price level of the place it is spent. The break-even salary is solved by bisection rather than by scaling, because brackets, the Social Security ceiling and a property tax that does not move with income all break the proportional relationship — a proportional shortcut is out by thousands at the incomes where people negotiate.

Nothing is extrapolated. Where a figure has not been read from a primary source it is absent rather than estimated, and the site says so on the page where it would have appeared.

Sources

• —US Bureau of Economic Analysis — Regional Price Parities by State and Metro Area, 2024 (released 19 February 2026) https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area — read 2026-09-08
• —IRS — Revenue Procedure for the tax year (federal brackets, standard deduction and FICA) https://www.irs.gov/ — read 2026-09-02
• —Each state's own department of revenue (state income tax rates and deductions), verified one state at a time https://estimatetax.net/sources/ — read 2026-09-02
• —US Census Bureau, American Community Survey (county effective property tax rates) https://data.census.gov/ — read 2026-08-31

Limits

• —The price index is the 2024 release, the most recent published, and is a state-wide average. Within one state a metro area and a rural county differ by more than most state pairs do.
• —Moving costs, transfer taxes on buying, and the cost of selling are not included.
• —Sales tax is inside the BEA index — that is what a price parity measures — but is not broken out separately.
• —The comparison holds salary constant across states. In practice a job in a high-cost state usually pays more, which is what the break-even column is for.

Corrections

Errors found in this data are published with the date, what they affected and what now prevents them, at https://estimatetax.net/corrections/ — including the ones we found ourselves. A dataset with no correction log is either very new or not being checked.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Use it, including commercially; cite it.

Citation

Ruiz Quintero, P. (2026). US state and local tax, cost of living, and relocation comparisons. estimatetax.net. Generated 2026-09-08.

How this was generated

npx tsx scripts/exportar-dataset.ts against the site's own calculation engine — the same code that produces every published page, so the CSV and the website cannot disagree.

Generated 2026-09-08 from commit c133b5a2f51d5464610e11c502399b30a973a195 of https://github.com/prq1996/estimatetax — check out that commit and run the script to reproduce these files byte for byte.