One salary, ranked by what it actually buys.

The plain by-state ranking shows what a salary deposits: federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, state income tax, and employee-paid state programs, taken out of the same salary in every state. At $75,000 the whole country lands within about $5,600 of each other, because federal tax and FICA are identical everywhere and state income tax is a smaller slice than most people expect.

That deposit does not go as far in one state as in another. A dollar buys more in Mississippi than in California. To show what a paycheck is worth rather than what it says, each state's take-home is divided by its Regional Price Parity, the Bureau of Economic Analysis's measure of local price levels, where the national average is 100. A state at 112.6 has prices about 12.6% above average, so its take-home is worth about 11% less than the number on the check. A state at 87 is about 13% below average, so its take-home stretches further.

Adjusting this way reorders the list. High-tax, high-cost states like California, Hawaii, New York, and New Jersey fall toward the bottom; low-cost states, several of which also have no income tax, rise to the top. The best-to-worst gap roughly triples. It is the same arithmetic BEA itself uses to compare real incomes across states.

This is a planning estimate, not anyone's budget. Price parities are state averages. A city and a rural county in the same state can sit far apart, and housing is the biggest single driver of the spread. See how every number here is verified.