States With No Tax on Retirement Income (2025)
12 of the 37 jurisdictions we publish tax none of the three categories — Social Security, pensions, or 401(k) and IRA withdrawals.
They get there two different ways, and the difference matters if you still work. 9 levy no individual income tax at all, so wages are untaxed too. 3 tax wage income normally but exempt retirement income — good for a retiree, irrelevant for a salary.
Retirement treatment shown for tax year 2025, the most recent year for which states have published these rules. Rate schedules elsewhere on this site are for a later tax year; the two are verified separately and are labelled separately.
No individual income tax at all
These states levy no individual income tax, so the question of how they treat retirement income does not arise. Nothing you receive — wages, pension, Social Security, an IRA withdrawal — is taxed by the state.
- Alaska
No individual income tax
- Florida
No individual income tax
- Nevada
No individual income tax
- New Hampshire
No individual income tax
- South Dakota
No individual income tax
- Tennessee
No individual income tax
- Texas
No individual income tax
- Washington
No individual income tax
- Wyoming
No individual income tax
These states still raise revenue — usually through higher sales, property or severance taxes. See states with no income tax for the rate-side detail.
Tax wages, but exempt retirement income
These states run a normal individual income tax and then exempt every retirement category we track. For a retiree with no earned income the result is the same as a no-income-tax state; for someone still working it is not.
| Jurisdiction | How the exemption works |
|---|---|
| Illinois | Federally taxed income from qualified employee benefit plans, government retirement and government disability plans may be subtracted in full. |
| Iowa | For tax years beginning on or after 1 January 2023, retirement income is excluded from Iowa taxable income for taxpayers aged 55 or older on 31 December of the tax year. |
| Mississippi | Retirement income from federal, state and private retirement systems is exempt in total where the plan's retirement requirements have been met. |
Why "retirement-tax-free" lists disagree with each other
Most published lists mean different things by the same phrase. Some count any state that exempts Social Security. Some count states with a generous pension exclusion as though the exclusion were unlimited. Some quietly ignore that a state exempts public pensions and taxes private ones.
The test used here is strict and stated: a state qualifies only if all three categories — Social Security, private pensions, and 401(k) and IRA distributions — are untaxed with no cap, no age gate and no income limit. A state that exempts $50,000 of pension income is not on this list, however good a deal that is. It is on the full table, with the cap shown.
The other side of the question: states that tax pensions and states that tax Social Security.
What this page does not tell you
These are the rules a state applies to retirement income, not a calculation of your bill. Whether a particular pension or account qualifies for an exclusion usually turns on the plan, your age, your service history and your income — facts this dataset does not hold about you.
14 jurisdictions are withheld from every figure and count on this page because we could not establish the treatment from a primary source: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah. They are excluded rather than estimated. That is deliberate: a wrong "does not tax Social Security" is exactly the kind of claim someone moves house on.
How we verify this data · Sources · Disclaimer — this is published information, not tax advice.