State tax and rent tradeoffs when you compare metros

Texas, Florida, Washington, Tennessee, Nevada and a handful of others do not tax wage income. Recruiters mention this in the first paragraph. It is real: a household earning $120,000 in Illinois or California is handing a visible slice of that to the state, and that slice is zero in Dallas.

Leftover asks a ruder question. After you stop paying that state tax, what do you pay the landlord, and what do you pay the county if you buy? A 5% state income tax on $120,000 is $6,000 a year before deductions — $500 a month. A one-bedroom that is $600 a month higher wipes the raise and then some. Property tax at 1.6% of a $400,000 house is $6,400 a year, which is also $500 a month, and it shows up the moment you stop renting.

Uprootmap prices the wage-tax side on every city page and the property-tax side on the housing topic. The ranking uses leftover after rent, not after a mortgage, so a no-income-tax state with cheap apartments can look brilliant on the paycheck page and merely fine once you open rent vs buy.

“No income tax” is not a single market. Compare four metros people actually search:

• Austin and Houston — no Texas wage tax, asking rents that are no longer 2018 cheap, and property tax rates that are among the highest on this site. Houston leftover often beats Austin for the same household because the rent gap is larger than the wage gap.
• Seattle and Spokane — same state, no income tax, wildly different rent. The Seattle leftover story is high local pay versus high housing. Spokane is the “keep a remote salary, pay inland rent” version of the same tax code.
• Miami and Tampa — no Florida wage tax, rents that ran up through the 2020s, and insurance that the model only partly captures through the ownership yardstick. If leftover looks tight, it is the rent, not a state income tax you imagined.
• Nashville and Knoxville — no Tennessee wage tax, a real healthcare and music economy in one and the Smokies in the other. Sales tax is high. Leftover still usually clears a high-tax Northeast metro for the same bedroom count.

Open them as pairs rather than as a “no-tax states” list. Chicago vs Austin and Seattle vs Spokane run both tax codes (or the same one) on one household.

A handful of metros add a local wage tax on top of the state. Philadelphia (3.75%), New York City, Baltimore, and several Ohio and Kentucky cities are the ones that move leftover enough to notice. Sites that stop at the state line make Philadelphia look like a cheaper East Coast and then cannot explain why take-home feels worse than Pittsburgh or Richmond.

If you are leaving one of those cities, leftover elsewhere gets a raise you will not see on a COL index. If you are moving into one, the index will not warn you. The city page tax line spells it out in one sentence; the methodology lists the rates we model and the credits we do not.

Texas, Illinois, New Jersey and parts of New York collect a lot of household tax through the property bill. That does not hit leftover on the paycheck page, because leftover assumes you rent. It hits the moment you open housing and look at “own the median home.”

Two practical consequences:

• A renter moving Chicago → Austin often wins leftover on the paycheck page (Illinois tax disappears, Texas rent is not Chicago-expensive for a one-bedroom). A buyer comparing the same pair has to add Austin's property tax to the mortgage. The housing page does that at 6.5%, 20% down, plus 1.1% for insurance and upkeep.
• A renter moving into Birmingham or Honolulu sees the opposite: low property tax, so buying looks better relative to the home price than a Texas page will.

If you know you will buy in year one, treat the housing topic as the headline and the paycheck leftover as the rental year. If you will rent for three years, do the opposite.

Tax is half the tradeoff. Rent is the other half, and average rent is the wrong half. A studio in New York and a three-bedroom in Raleigh are not comparable units, and the premium for the extra rooms is not 1.3× everywhere. The model stores a two-bedroom asking rent per metro and scales the other sizes with national ratios — a known-imperfect choice, written up in the methodology.

What you should do with that: set the bedroom count you will actually rent. Then look at listings. If the model says $1,650 and every acceptable three-bedroom is $2,100, your leftover is $450 worse than the page. Do not “correct” it by picking a cheaper metro on an index; correct the rent line.

1. On the homepage, set local vs remote pay first. That switch is usually worth more than the state tax line.
2. Set bedrooms to the unit you would sign, not the unit you wish you needed.
3. Rank leftover on /results. Note which of the top ten have no state income tax, which have a city wage tax, and which have high property tax — the city page tax tile says so in one line.
4. Open two compares across a tax border (Illinois → Texas, New York → North Carolina, California → Washington) and one compare inside a no-tax state (Austin vs Houston, Seattle vs Spokane) so you can see rent without the tax story getting in the way.
5. If you will buy, open the housing topic before you fall in love with a no-tax leftover number.

The metro checklist is the full version of this order. The mistakes guide covers the COL-percentage version of the same error.