Finance

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01 · The section

Seven collections, 242 articles, and the layer where most of the errors live

This is the largest section on the site, and the one that goes out of date fastest. Everything in it depends on figures that reset in January, and on a second layer that resets whenever a state legislature feels like it.

The federal layer is easy. The IRS, the Social Security Administration and the Federal Housing Finance Agency publish their numbers in advance, in documents with reference numbers, and anyone can check them. The state layer is where the trouble is, and the reason is structural: nobody publishes it in one place. There is no federal page listing which states tax income. There is no federal consolidation of what each state withholds from a lottery prize. There is no single official source for how much property tax you would pay in one state against another. Every one of those has to be assembled state by state from fifty separate revenue departments, which is exactly why so much of what circulates about state taxes is a few years stale and nobody notices.

Collection	Articles	What it covers	How much your state changes the answer
VA Loan	66	Eligibility, the funding fee, assumption, refinancing	A lot. Property tax is escrowed into the payment
Lottery	37	Withholding, the lump sum decision, the real odds	Enormous. From nothing to nearly ten percent
Salary	37	Converting pay, and what reaches the account	A lot. Nine states take no income tax at all
Living Wage	31	What an income needs to be to cover local costs	Almost all of it. This is a local question
Interest Rate Cap	30	Pricing caps for floating-rate borrowers	Very little. This one is a market question
Land Loan	28	Financing raw land, underwritten differently	Some. Agricultural lending runs on its own system
Illinois Salary	13	Illinois withholding and take-home pay	It is the whole point of the collection

What is federal, what is state, and what is neither

Almost every argument about money on the internet is really an argument about which of these three columns a figure belongs in. Sorting it first saves a great deal of time.

Federal, same everywhere	State, and it varies enormously	Neither, so nobody publishes it
Income tax brackets and the standard deduction	Whether there is a state income tax at all	What a household needs to earn in a given city
Social Security and Medicare rates and the wage base	Property tax, which varies by more than ten times	The 28/36 housing and debt ratios
Retirement contribution limits	Minimum wage above the federal floor	A safe retirement withdrawal rate
The 24 percent lottery withholding rate	State lottery withholding, from zero upward	A house price as a multiple of salary
Conforming loan limits	Recording and transfer taxes on a purchase	A land loan premium over mortgage rates
The VA funding fee	Property tax escrowed into the same payment	Which debt payoff order is better
The overtime salary threshold	State overtime rules where they are stricter

The first column is easy to check and hard to get wrong, because each figure has one publisher and a reference number. The second is where most stale content lives, for the reason given above. The third is the interesting one: those are not gaps in the published data, they are questions no agency has ever taken responsibility for, and the numbers that circulate to fill them come from conventions, research papers and habit.

How to read this section

If your question is about a rate, a limit or a threshold, it is probably federal and there is a document with the answer. If it is about what you will actually pay or keep, the state layer is doing most of the work and a national figure will mislead you. And if it is a rule of thumb with a memorable number in it, check whether anybody published it before you plan around it.

Article counts are live as of 18 August 2026. Each collection has its own hub page with the material specific to it. This page covers what runs underneath all seven.

02 · The nine

Nine states take no income tax, and that list is less stable than it looks

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming do not tax wage income. That much gets repeated everywhere. What gets repeated alongside it is usually two or three years out of date, because three of the nine have changed recently or are about to.

New Hampshire is now fully in the club, and most pages have not caught up

For years New Hampshire was described as a state with no wage tax that still taxed interest and dividends. That has stopped being true. The Interest and Dividends Tax was repealed for taxable periods beginning after 31 December 2024. There is now no state in the country that taxes only investment income. Any page that still carries that caveat is describing a rule that no longer exists.

Washington is going the other way

Washington enacted an income tax in 2026. It is narrow, it does not start yet, and it does not touch most people, but the sentence "Washington will never tax income" is now simply false. Under the 2026 legislation the state will levy 9.9 percent on Washington taxable income above $1 million per individual, computed from federal adjusted gross income, effective 1 January 2028, with the first returns filed in 2029. Washington also already runs a separate 7 percent capital gains excise tax.

For 2026 and 2027 Washington belongs on the no-wage-tax list. From 2028 the list needs a footnote. Whether lottery winnings fall inside the new base is not something the state has spelled out, and since the tax starts from federal adjusted gross income the likely answer is yes, but nobody should assert that until the state says so.

Mississippi is trying to join

Mississippi is phasing its individual income tax out, cutting the rate in steps and then relying on revenue growth triggers to take it to zero. It still taxes wages in 2026. So the state is neither in the nine nor safely outside them, and anything written about Mississippi income tax needs a date on it more than most.

Why this keeps going wrong. There is no federal page that lists which states tax income. The IRS does not publish one, and neither does any other agency, because it is not their business. The list has to be built by reading fifty state revenue departments, so it gets built once, copied widely, and then nobody rebuilds it. Three of the nine entries above changed within the last two years.

Which state taxes you is not always the one you live in

The list above answers a simpler question than most people are actually asking. States generally tax residents on all of their income and nonresidents on income earned within their borders, which means someone who lives in one state and works in another can fall inside two systems at once. The usual remedy is a credit in the home state for tax paid to the other, and some pairs of states have arrangements that simplify it further, but the mechanics differ by pair and none of it is automatic.

This matters more than it used to. Remote work has produced large numbers of people whose employer, residence and physical workplace are in three different places, and the rules were not written with that in mind. It also matters for one-off money: a lottery ticket bought while travelling can create a filing obligation in the state where it was bought, regardless of where the winner lives.

The practical version is that "does my state tax income" is the first question and rarely the last one. If you live and work in different states, or you earned something significant in a state you were only visiting, the answer involves two sets of rules and a credit mechanism, and it is worth an hour of a professional time rather than an afternoon of reading.

No income tax does not mean no tax

A state that does not tax income raises the money somewhere else, and for most households that somewhere is property and sales. Texas has no income tax and a median real estate tax bill of $4,108. New Hampshire has no income tax and a median of $6,707, which is the second highest in the country. Comparing two states on income tax alone tells you very little about what you will actually pay, which is what the next section is about.

03 · State minimum wages

Thirty states are above the federal floor, thirteen sit exactly on it, and seven have no minimum of their own

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and has not moved since 2009. That figure is nearly meaningless as a description of what anybody earns, because for most of the country it has been overtaken by a state rate. The Department of Labor keeps the consolidated table, and it sorts the states into three groups.

Group	Count	What it means in practice
Above the federal $7.25	30 states	Plus DC, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The state rate applies
Exactly $7.25	13 states	Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin
No state minimum, or below federal	7 states	Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming. Federal $7.25 governs covered workers

Five of those seven have no state minimum wage law at all. Georgia and Wyoming have one that is set below the federal figure, which means it is overridden for anyone the federal law covers and only bites in the narrow cases where it does not.

State	2026 rate	Note
Washington	$17.13	The highest state rate in the country
New York	$17.00	New York City, Long Island and Westchester. $16.00 elsewhere
Connecticut	$16.94
California	$16.90
Oregon	$16.80	Portland metro. $15.55 standard, $14.55 nonurban
New Jersey	$15.92	$15.23 for small employers
Colorado	$15.16
Arizona	$15.15
Maine	$15.10
Illinois	$15.00
Missouri	$15.00	Reached $15 by ballot measure
Nebraska	$15.00	Reached $15 by ballot measure
Florida	$14.00
Alaska	$14.00	Mid-ramp, rising to $15 in 2027
Michigan	$13.73
Montana	$10.85

Department of Labor, consolidated state minimum wage table, updated 1 July 2026. The District of Columbia is higher than any state at $18.40, but DC is not a state and is worth keeping separate when comparing.

Three things this map hides

Cities can go higher than states. The DOL table is a state-level table and local governments frequently set rates above it. A state figure is a floor within that state, not a description of what a particular city requires.
Several states have more than one rate. New York splits by region, Oregon runs three tiers, New Jersey splits by employer size. A single number per state is a simplification that stops being true the moment it matters.
Ramps are common and the published figure is a snapshot. Alaska is partway through a scheduled climb to $15. Missouri and Nebraska both arrived at $15 through ballot measures rather than legislation. A rate quoted without a year is close to useless in this area.

04 · Property tax

The biggest state-level swing in American household finance

Income tax gets the attention. Property tax moves more money for more people, and the spread between states is far wider than anything in the income tax code. These are median real estate taxes actually paid by owner-occupiers, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which is the closest thing to an authoritative comparison that exists.

State	Median real estate tax paid	Against the US median
New Jersey	$9,358	2.9 times the national figure
New Hampshire	$6,707	No income tax, second highest property tax
Connecticut	$6,573
New York	$6,542
Massachusetts	$6,080
Illinois	$5,399
California	$5,369
Texas	$4,108	No income tax
United States	$3,211	The national median
Florida	$2,993	No income tax
Mississippi	$1,221
Louisiana	$1,187
Arkansas	$1,113
Alabama	$890
West Virginia	$881	The lowest in the country

Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 one-year estimates, table B25103, median real estate taxes paid for all owner-occupied units. The 2025 estimates are due in September 2026, so treat these as 2024 figures.

New Jersey pays ten times what West Virginia pays

That is the headline, and it is worth sitting with. The gap between the top and bottom state is 10.6 times. Nothing in the federal income tax code produces a spread anything like that between two ordinary households. If you are comparing two places to live, or running a mortgage calculation for a house in a state you do not live in yet, this is the number that will move your answer most, and it is the one most likely to be missing from whatever tool you used.

The Texas detail worth knowing

The same Census table splits owners with a mortgage from owners without one, and Texas has the sharpest gap in the country: $5,273 for owners with a mortgage against $2,771 for owners without. Some of that is exemptions that apply differently, and much of it is simply that people with mortgages tend to own newer and more expensive houses. Either way, if you are buying in Texas, the figure that describes your situation is the higher one, not the state median.

What to do with this. A payment calculator gives you principal and interest. Property tax and insurance sit on top and are usually escrowed into the same monthly payment, so the number the calculator showed you is not the number leaving your account. County assessors publish the actual bill for individual parcels, so for a specific house you can replace the state median with the real figure in a few minutes. That single substitution moves the answer more than shopping for a better rate.

05 · Lottery withholding

Where state rules are least like each other, and least documented

Lottery withholding is the clearest illustration of the state layer, because the rules are not variations on a theme. They differ in the rate, in the threshold at which withholding starts, in whether nonresidents are treated differently, and in one case in whether the state taxes its own lottery at all. No federal source consolidates any of it.

State	State withholding	Starts at	The detail that catches people
California	None	n/a	Has an income tax but exempts California Lottery winnings outright
Texas	None	n/a	No state income tax. Federal 24 percent still applies over $5,000
Maryland	9.5%	$5,001	8.75 percent for nonresidents. Prizes from $601 are taxable but not withheld
New Jersey	5% / 8%	$10,001	5 percent up to $500,000, then 8 percent above it
Illinois	4.95%	$1,000	The lowest withholding threshold of the group by a wide margin
Michigan	4.25%	Per state guide	Flat rate, set annually in the withholding guide
Pennsylvania	3.07%	Over $5,000	Flat, and the lottery withholds automatically
New York	Highest effective rate	Over $5,000	Withheld at the state top effective rate with no deductions or exemptions, plus city withholding for New York City and Yonkers residents

Rates from each state lottery or revenue department, checked 18 August 2026. New York publishes a method rather than a headline number in Publication 140-W, so the rate is described here rather than quoted.

Three things this table shows that a single-state page cannot

The threshold matters as much as the rate. Illinois withholds from $1,000, New Jersey from $10,001. On a $5,000 prize an Illinois winner has money taken and a New Jersey winner does not, before either has thought about what they owe.
Withholding is not the tax. Every rate above is a prepayment. The final bill is settled on a return, and for a large prize the federal shortfall alone is substantial, because 24 percent is withheld and the top federal rate is 37 percent. States work the same way.
California is the anomaly worth remembering. It is a high-tax state that takes nothing from its own lottery. That is unusual enough that it gets miscopied constantly, usually by pages that then apply the same logic to a state where it is not true.

The correction worth making. Delaware appears on many lists of states that exempt lottery winnings. It does not exempt them. Delaware does not withhold state tax at the point of claim, which is probably where the error started, but its own lottery states that all winning Delaware tickets are subject to Delaware income tax. Not withholding and not taxing are different things, and the difference arrives with the return.

06 · The gap

Withholding is a prepayment, and treating it as the bill is the costliest habit here

The same mechanism runs underneath salary, bonuses and lottery prizes, and it is misunderstood in the same way each time. Money is taken out before it reaches you, at a rate set for administrative convenience rather than accuracy, and the difference between that rate and what you actually owe is settled months later.

Where it shows up	What is taken	What is actually owed	When you find out
Regular pay	Whatever your W-4 produces	Your real liability on the return	April
Lottery and gambling	24 percent over $5,000 in proceeds	Up to 37 percent on a large prize	April
State prize withholding	Nothing to nearly 10 percent	The state rate on your whole year	April
Self-employment	Nothing automatically	Everything, plus both halves of payroll tax	Quarterly, if you are doing it right

The arithmetic on a large prize

Take a cash payout of $10 million. Federal withholding at 24 percent takes $2.4 million at source. But a prize that size lands far above the point where the top federal rate begins, which for a single filer in 2026 is $640,600 of taxable income, so most of it is taxed at 37 percent. The difference is roughly thirteen percentage points on the bulk of the money, which is well over a million dollars still owed after the withholding has already happened. State tax then sits on top of that, at anything from zero to nearly ten percent depending on where the ticket was bought and where the winner lives.

The failure mode is not complicated. Somebody sees the number that arrives, treats it as theirs, and commits it. The money that was never theirs is the money the return asks for.

The same logic, quieter, on a paycheck

Payroll withholding is an estimate produced by a form you filled in once, possibly at a different job, possibly before you married or had a child or took on a second income. It is not a calculation of what you owe. A refund means it was too high all year and you lent the money interest-free. A bill means it was too low. Neither is a reward or a punishment, and both are worth fixing at the form rather than absorbing every April.

Where the reporting threshold just changed

One figure in this area moved for 2026 and almost nothing online reflects it. The threshold at which a payer must issue a Form W-2G was $600 for decades. For payments made in calendar year 2026 it is $2,000, and it is indexed to inflation from here on. The separate 24 percent withholding threshold did not change and still applies to proceeds over $5,000. Those two thresholds get conflated constantly even by pages that have the numbers right.

The habit that fixes most of this. Whenever money arrives with something already taken out, ask what rate was applied and whether that rate has anything to do with your actual situation. On a paycheck the answer is a form you can change. On a prize the answer is a flat rate that was never meant to be accurate. In both cases the gap is yours to cover, and knowing its size in advance is the whole job.

07 · Comparing places

What it costs to live somewhere, and the federal answer that does not exist in the form people want

The most common question in this section is some version of comparing two places. What almost everybody assumes is that a federal agency publishes a cost of living index by city, and that a number can be looked up. The reality is more interesting and worth stating exactly, because getting it wrong in either direction is easy.

What the Bureau of Labor Statistics says about its own data

The Consumer Price Index is not a cost of living index, and BLS says so in its own FAQ. It describes the CPI as differing in important ways from a complete cost of living measure. More directly, when asked whether indexes for individual areas can be used to compare living costs between those areas, BLS answers no: an area index measures how much prices have changed over a period in that area, and it does not show whether prices or living costs are higher or lower there than somewhere else.

This matters because city CPI figures are widely quoted as though they did exactly that. They do not. A city with a higher CPI reading has seen faster price growth, not more expensive prices.

What the Bureau of Economic Analysis does publish

There is a federal geographic price comparison, and it is not from BLS. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Regional Price Parities, which measure differences in price levels across states and metropolitan areas for a given year, expressed as a percentage of the national price level. The most recent covers 2024 and was released in February 2026.

Regional Price Parities are the right tool for one specific question, which is whether things generally cost more in one metro than another. They are the wrong tool for the question most people are actually asking, which is what a household of a particular size and composition would need to earn in a particular place. A price level is not a budget, and a parity figure will not tell you what childcare costs where you are moving.

The distinction in one line. BLS measures how prices change over time and says plainly that its area figures cannot compare places. BEA measures how price levels compare between places and does not build household budgets. Neither publishes what a family needs to earn in a given city, which is why that gap gets filled by university and nonprofit projects instead of by an agency.

The living wage collection covers what fills that gap and what each of those figures actually measures, including the fact that the best known of them is a research project rather than a government product. That distinction is worth carrying into any comparison you read: a number can be carefully built, widely used and genuinely useful while still having nobody official standing behind it.

08 · The collections

Seven collections, and which one answers your question

Each has its own hub with the material specific to it. Counts are current as of 18 August 2026.

VA Loan

66 articles. The largest collection here, and the one where a single misunderstanding costs the most.

Start with the VA Loan hubEligibility, entitlement, the funding fee, assumption and refinancing.
VA Loan CalculatorNo monthly mortgage insurance, but a one-off funding fee instead.

Lottery

37 articles on tax, odds, the lump sum decision and where the money actually goes.

Start with the Lottery hubPrize pool splits, both odds tables, and where unclaimed prizes go.
Lottery CalculatorJackpot, withholding and the cash value question.

Salary

37 articles on converting pay between units, and on the difference between gross and what lands.

Start with the Salary hubFour official average-salary figures side by side, and why they disagree.
Annual Salary CalculatorHourly to yearly, on 2026 figures.
Take Home Pay CalculatorGross to net, which is the number that matters.

Living Wage

31 articles on what an income needs to be to cover real local costs, which is the most local question in this section.

Start with the Living Wage hubThree official numbers that measure three different things.
Living Wage CalculatorWhat an income needs to cover basic local costs.

Interest Rate Cap

30 articles. The most specialist collection here, and the least affected by where you live.

Start with the Interest Rate Cap hubSOFR history and real cap premiums pulled from SEC filings.
Rate Cap Premium CalculatorPricing a cap for a floating-rate loan.

Land Loan

28 articles on buying raw land, where the constraint is equity rather than rate.

Start with the Land Loan hubWhat is actually published, and the 65 percent supervisory loan-to-value limit.
Land Loan CalculatorPayments on land, which is underwritten differently.

Illinois Salary

13 articles. A single-state collection, which is the state layer made explicit.

Start with the Illinois Salary hubIllinois withholding, the flat rate, and take-home pay.
Illinois Paycheck CalculatorState-specific withholding for Illinois.

The full set of money tools is in finance calculators, and the other eleven sections are on the blog hub.

09 · Questions

Questions this section gets, with the source named

Which states have no income tax in 2026?

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. New Hampshire joined the list properly when its interest and dividends tax was repealed for periods beginning after 31 December 2024, so no state now taxes investment income only.

Is it true that Washington has no income tax?

For 2026 and 2027, yes, on wages. Washington enacted a 9.9 percent tax on income above $1 million per individual in 2026, effective from 1 January 2028 with the first returns in 2029. It also already levies a separate 7 percent capital gains excise tax.

Which state has the highest property tax?

New Jersey, at a median real estate tax bill of $9,358, against a national median of $3,211 and a low of $881 in West Virginia. Those are Census American Community Survey 2024 one-year estimates for owner-occupied units.

Does a state with no income tax cost less overall?

Not necessarily. New Hampshire takes no income tax and has the second highest median property tax in the country at $6,707. States raise revenue somewhere, and for most households the alternative is property and sales tax.

How much does my state take from a lottery prize?

Anything from nothing to nearly ten percent, and the threshold at which withholding starts varies too. Illinois withholds from $1,000, New Jersey from $10,001. California has an income tax but exempts its own lottery outright.

Is the 24 percent withheld from a jackpot the tax I owe?

No. It is a prepayment. A large prize is taxed at rates up to 37 percent federally, which begins at $640,600 of taxable income for a single filer in 2026, so a substantial balance is still due on the return. State tax sits on top.

What is the minimum wage in my state?

Thirty states are above the federal $7.25, thirteen are exactly on it, and seven have no state minimum or one below the federal figure. Washington is highest at $17.13. Cities can and do set rates above their state, so a state figure is a floor rather than an answer.

Where can I compare the cost of living between two cities?

Not from the Consumer Price Index. BLS states that its individual area indexes cannot be used to compare living costs between areas. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Regional Price Parities, which compare price levels across states and metro areas, but a price level is not a household budget.

10 · Sources

Where the state figures on this page come from

No federal agency consolidates any of this, so each figure is cited to the body that actually publishes it. Checked 18 August 2026.

States with no income tax. Assembled state by state, because no federal source lists them: Florida Department of Revenue, Nevada Department of Taxation, South Dakota Department of Revenue, Tennessee Department of Revenue GEN-34, and Article VIII section 24-a of the Texas Constitution.
New Hampshire. New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration, on the repeal of the Interest and Dividends Tax for taxable periods beginning after 31 December 2024.
Washington. Washington Department of Revenue, income tax, and the final bill report for ESSB 6346, chapter 238, laws of 2026. Also the separate capital gains tax.
Property tax. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 one-year estimates, table B25103, median real estate taxes paid, including the split between owners with and without a mortgage.
State minimum wages. Department of Labor consolidated state minimum wage table, updated 1 July 2026, and the state minimum wage page.
Lottery withholding. California Franchise Tax Board, Maryland Lottery, New Jersey Division of Taxation, Illinois Department of Revenue, Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, New York Publication 140-W, and the Texas Lottery.
Federal withholding and thresholds. IRS Instructions for Forms W-2G and 5754 for the 24 percent rate, the $5,000 proceeds threshold and the 2026 reporting threshold, and the IRS 2026 inflation adjustments for the top bracket.
Comparing places. BLS Consumer Price Index FAQ, on the CPI not being a cost of living index and area indexes not comparing areas, and BEA Regional Price Parities.
Checked and found silent. No federal agency publishes a list of states without an income tax, a consolidation of state lottery withholding, or a household cost of living comparison between cities. Those have to be assembled from state sources or come from outside government entirely.

Scope note. State figures were current on 18 August 2026 and change on their own schedules. Minimum wages commonly change on 1 January and sometimes mid-year, state tax rates change by legislation, and the Census property tax estimates are updated each September. Nothing here is tax, legal or financial advice, and state rules vary in ways a national summary cannot capture. For anything that turns on a specific amount, check your own state revenue department or speak to someone who can see your whole position.