Tyreek Hill Cited State Taxes When He Chose Miami Over the Jets. The $8 Million Gap Between Florida and New Jersey

Dek: Wide receiver Tyreek Hill said state taxes shaped his 2022 choice between Miami and the Jets. The instructive twist: the Jets don’t actually play in New York, and the jock tax is a patchwork, not a rate.

When the Kansas City Chiefs traded Tyreek Hill in March 2022, Hill publicly credited state income tax as one reason he preferred Miami to a deal with the New York Jets. The number that stuck was an $8 million lifetime tax gap between the two contracts, sourced to a Tax Foundation analysis published October 4, 2022 titled "Tyreek Hill’s Tax Liability with Every NFL Franchise."

That figure reflects two specific contract offers under the tax law of that moment, based on 2022 conditions. But the mechanics behind it are permanent, and they apply to anyone weighing a move for tax reasons, athlete or not.

What Hill Actually Said, and When

Hill’s "state taxes" explanation came in October 2022, in the aftermath of the trade. He framed Florida’s zero state income tax as a meaningful edge over what he would have paid signing with the Jets. The Tax Foundation’s contemporaneous math put the lifetime difference between the two offers at roughly $8 million.

Read literally, that is a gap large enough to matter even to a top-of-market receiver. Read carefully, it is also a gap built on assumptions about contract structure, residency, and where games are played, none of which are automatic.

Jets Home Games Are Taxed in New Jersey

Here is the detail almost every casual retelling gets wrong. The New York Jets play their home games at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. That means a Jets contract is, for tax purposes, largely a New Jersey contract, not a New York one.

New Jersey imposes a state income tax with top brackets that reach into the high single digits for the incomes NFL stars earn. New York also has a state income tax, and it applies to road games played at the Giants’ and Bills’ stadiums, at Yankee Stadium adjacent venues, and to any days a player performs services inside New York’s borders. Florida, by contrast, imposes no state individual income tax.

The Tax Foundation’s adjusted 2024 state and local tax burden data captures the broader pattern. New York sits at the top of the list at $10,828 per capita, New Jersey ranks eighth at $8,152, and Florida sits near the bottom at $5,110.

Jock Tax: A Patchwork, Not a Rate

Professional athletes owe income tax to every state they perform in, allocated by "duty days." That is the jock tax. A Dolphin’s paycheck for a Week 4 road game in Buffalo is sourced to New York. A game in Foxborough is sourced to Massachusetts. Only the home games and Florida-based work escape state tax entirely.

So Hill’s real annual liability worked as a mosaic: Florida for residency and home games, then a stack of nonresident returns for every away game. Signing with the Jets would have flipped that mosaic, sourcing home game pay to New Jersey and adding a resident-state filing at New Jersey rates.

That is the mechanism behind the $8 million figure. It is the compounding effect of resident-state rate, home-game sourcing, and how signing bonuses are allocated across the contract’s life.

How Ordinary Readers Can Apply This

Skip the shoulder pads. The same math drives retirement relocation decisions, and the dollars can rival Hill’s on a percentage basis.

A retiree drawing $120,000 a year from a mix of pensions, IRA withdrawals, and Social Security faces a real spread depending on domicile. New Jersey taxes IRA withdrawals and offers a pension exclusion only under specific income limits. New York exempts the first $20,000 of private pension and IRA income for taxpayers 59 1/2 and older and fully exempts Social Security. Florida taxes none of it at the state level.

Cost of living tempers the story. Florida’s cost of living index sits at 103.414, above the national benchmark of 100, while New Jersey’s is 108.805. Groceries, insurance, and housing eat into the state-tax savings.

Three moves matter for anyone considering a Hill-style residency shift:

• Establish domicile intentionally: driver’s license, voter registration, primary physician, and 183-plus days on the ground in the new state.
• Track duty days if you keep earning W-2 or 1099 income across state lines. Consulting gigs and board seats create nonresident filings the same way road games do.
• Model the full picture: property tax, sales tax, and estate or inheritance tax at the state level, not just the headline income rate.

The kind of multi-state residency and withdrawal-order math involved here is worth running with a CPA who files in more than one state.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not tax, legal, or investment advice. Consult a qualified tax professional about your specific situation.

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