The three inputs
1. Wages
Median annual wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, May 2025 state estimates — the most recent release. We use the median, not the mean, because a handful of very high earners pulls the mean away from what a typical worker sees. Occupations are identified by their Standard Occupational Classification code, and the codes are published in the dataset so you can trace any figure back.
We selected 34 occupations to cover the range of American work rather than the top of it: healthcare, education, public safety, the trades, transport, retail, food service, offices and professional roles. Three occupations are missing a single state each because BLS suppressed the estimate for disclosure reasons, so the dataset has 1,731 rows rather than 1734. One occupation, flight attendant, was dropped entirely: BLS publishes it for fewer than half the states.
2. Tax
Take-home pay is calculated with the same engine that runs our paycheck calculator, for calendar year 2026. It applies:
- federal income tax on the gross wage less the standard deduction, using the 2026 brackets;
- Social Security at 6.2% up to the 2026 wage base, and Medicare at 1.45% with the additional 0.9% above the threshold;
- state income tax, including each state's own standard deduction, personal exemptions, exemption phase-outs and credits where they exist.
The filer is single, takes the standard deduction, has no dependents, no pre-tax deductions and no retirement contributions. No local or city income tax is applied, so residents of New York City, Philadelphia and similar jurisdictions keep less than the table shows. Every state's rules and the document they came from are listed on our sources page.
A worked example, so the arithmetic is visible. A registered nurse in California, on the state median of $140,270: federal income tax $22,399, Social Security $8,697, Medicare $2,034, California income tax $8,800. Take-home $98,340.
3. Prices
Regional Price Parities come from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2024 release — the most recent year published. An RPP of 100 is the national average price level. Hawaii sits near the top, Mississippi near the bottom. The adjustment is a straight division:
adjusted take-home = take-home ÷ (state price level ÷ 100)
So $80,000 of take-home pay in a state with a price level of 110 is worth $72,727 in national-average terms, and the same $80,000 in a state at 90 is worth $88,889. Every adjusted figure in the study is in those same national-average dollars, which is what makes the states comparable.
Why these three and not others
Taxes and prices are the two adjustments that apply to everyone in a state, are published consistently for all 51 jurisdictions, and can be applied without assumptions about an individual. We deliberately stopped there. Adding housing costs, commute lengths, childcare or state benefits would produce a richer index and a much less checkable one, because each of those requires choices that push the answer around.
What the numbers cannot tell you
- A median is not an offer. Half the people doing the job in that state earn less than the figure, half earn more. Experience, employer and specialism move it a long way.
- States are not uniform. One price level covers all of New York, so Manhattan and Buffalo are treated identically. Within-state variation is often larger than between-state variation.
- Different years. Wages are May 2025, prices are 2024, tax is 2026. That is the most recent data available for each, but they are not a single snapshot.
- Only income tax. Sales tax, property tax and vehicle tax are not modelled. Several states with no income tax recover a good deal of it elsewhere, which the price index captures only partially.
- Staffing mixes differ. Where a job is staffed very differently between states — firefighting is the clearest case, with heavy volunteer and part-time coverage in some states — the medians are not really comparing the same job. We flag those rather than remove them.
- No relocation costs. The gap between two states is an annual figure. Moving is not free, and the table says nothing about whether the job exists where the number is best.
Reproducing it
Download the full dataset as a CSV. It has one row per occupation and state, with the SOC code, gross median wage, take-home pay, state income tax, price level, adjusted figure and the state's rank within that occupation. The two public inputs are linked below; the tax step can be reproduced state by state in the paycheck calculator.
The dataset is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The underlying BLS and BEA data are US government works in the public domain.
Corrections
If you find an error we want to know: contact us, and anything we change will be logged on the corrections page. We would rather publish a correction than leave a wrong number up.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state estimates. Annual median wage by occupation and state.
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by state, 2024. The price level of each state, where the national average is 100.
- Federal income tax, Social Security and Medicare for 2026, and the income tax rules of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as listed on our sources page and applied by the paycheck calculator. The method is set out in full on the methodology page.