Tuesday, September 22, 2026
ExploreSearch
Via News
Source trace. Via News points to the documents behind its reporting and shows what we drew from each — so you can check any claim. How we source
Source document· February 17, 2026

How Much the Top 5% Pay in Taxes in Every State

View original at finance.yahoo.com
How Much the Top 5% Pay in Taxes in Every State The percentage of income America’s top earners get to keep varies dramatically depending on which state they call home…
Opening lines of the source · short snapshot — read the full document at the original

What we drew from this source

The claims Via News extracted from this document. We point to the source; we don't replace it.

  • Connecticut has the highest average top 5% income at $691,840, while Mississippi has the lowest at $350,029, a difference of over $300,000.

    80% confidence

  • South Dakota provides the most tax-friendly environment for the top 5%, with burdens of only 31.3% (single) and 23.6% (married).

    80% confidence

  • There are nine states with no state income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.

    80% confidence

  • The combined weight of federal, state and FICA taxes can consume nearly half of a paycheck in some areas while leaving significantly more on the table in others.

    80% confidence

  • High earners in California face the nation's heaviest tax burden, losing 42.8% of their income if filing single and 35.8% if married.

    80% confidence

  • Across all states, the average tax burden for a single filer is approximately 36.1%, while the burden for a married couple is 28.8%, representing a savings of over 7% of total income.

    80% confidence

  • In states with no state income tax, the total tax burden for the top 5% is driven almost entirely by federal and FICA taxes, consistently keeping their total burden below the national average.

    80% confidence
What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
Frontier AI Slowdown Call Splits Industry, Rattles Capex-Sensitive Markets
Anthropic's Dario Amodei publicly called for a coordinated global slowdown in frontier AI development, a stance Microsoft echoed with a 'humanist' AI code of conduct, but Nvidia and Meta's CEOs rejected any coordinated pause days later, exposing a widening rift between safety-focused and growth-focused AI leaders. The dispute landed amid growing financial scrutiny of AI infrastructure spending — a hyperscaler capex analysis, FTC warnings against antitrust waivers for AI firms, and an 8.6% single-day stock drop in GE Vernova tied directly to the slowdown remarks — signaling investors are newly nervous about whether the AI capex boom (including Alphabet's projected $701B revenue narrative) can be justified if the pace of development itself becomes contested.
Our read on the data ›
Signals we're tracking
Satellite-Terrestrial Network Integration Acceleration
Increased investment and launches in hybrid satellite-cellular networks across telecom industry; competitive responses from other carriers; regulatory activity around satellite spectrum; expansion of emergency/rural connectivity use cases
Patterns we're watching ›
Where sources disagree
ING Group
Both facts record the same metric (shares_outstanding) for ING Group at the identical observation date (2025-12-31). FACT A states 2,902,437,688 shares; FACT B states 2,902 million shares (2,902,000,000). The difference is 437,688 shares (~0.015%). This is a genuine value conflict, though the discrepancy appears to result from FACT B rounding to the nearest million while FACT A provides the precise count.
We flag conflicts openly ›
Recently verified
✓ Checked against the original source
4,983
facts traced to their source — and we flag the ones that don't hold up.
101 entities tracked4,983 facts checked against source5,304 source documents archived
Query this data → isubstrate.com
How Much the Top 5% Pay in Taxes in Every State — Source | Via News | Via News