By state · tax law
A state is not
one place.
Job posts, tax comparisons and relocation advice all talk in states. Costs do not. This page gives each state the only honest summary there is: the county in the middle, the two counties at the ends, and how far apart they are. Nothing here is a state average, because nobody lives in one.
Step one
Pick a state
Everything below follows from these three controls. The salary only affects the tax figures, since what a place costs does not depend on what you earn.
Step two
The same question, on a map
Every state as a table, ranked by spread
Step three
What this state is like to be taxed in
The rules, not a rating. Two states with the same top rate can be very different at an entry-level salary, which is why the bracket you actually land in is shown alongside the headline rate.
Step four
Inside the state
Every state, by where the money goes
Each row is that state's median county: a real place, with every figure in the row taken from that same one. States are ordered by what a month costs there. Shading runs down each column separately, because rent and a phone bill share no scale; the printed figure is always the actual dollar amount.
Where a state means least
How much dearer each state's most expensive county is than its cheapest. Near the bottom of this chart a state is one market and a single figure is nearly fair. At the top it is several, and any sentence beginning "in that state" is doing real damage.