States Where You’ll Pay Most in Lifetime Taxes, Led by New Jersey
A recent analysis reveals that the state in which people pay the most in taxes over their lifetime is New Jersey.
There are plenty of lists of states where people pay the most in property, income, city, and business taxes. But what about which state where people pay the most over a person’s lifetime? That state is New Jersey, and the figure is $987,117.
According to credit builders site Self, the average American will pay $524,625 in taxes during their lifetimes. That is 34.7% of their lifetime earnings. The figure includes federal taxes, FICA, and taxes on cars, homes, food, apparel, and personal care. It also assumes a person begins work at 22 and retires at 65. Data were collected from federal and state tax rates and information from WalletHub. Finally, “This study takes individual median earning information from the American Community Survey (2022) per state and applies inflation to bring estimates up to 2024 based on salary growth estimates of 5% in 2023 and 5.1% in January 2024.”
New Jersey tax payments over a lifetime are not only the highest based on dollar amount but also the highest based on percentage of total income, at 54.3% of earrings. The lifetime earnings for people who live in New Jersey totaled $1,818,191. (See the state and local taxes Americans pay in all 50 states.)
At the far end of the spectrum, residents of West Virginia pay $358,407 in taxes. That is 28.4% of their lifetime earnings of $1,263,434, among the lowest across all states.
These are the 10 states where people pay the most over a lifetime:
| State | Lifetime Taxes | % of Earnings |
| New Jersey | $987,117 | 54.3% |
| Connecticut | $855,307 | 49.4% |
| Vermont | $651,434 | 45.2% |
| New York | $748,199 | 45.1% |
| Massachusetts | $816,700 | 44.0% |
| New Hampshire | $722,610 | 43.2% |
| Rhode Island | $684,828 | 42.8% |
| Illinois | $665,286 | 42.1% |
| California | $659,224 | 41.5% |
| Maine | $581,750 | 40.9% |
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
