[ST-04] State Quick-Reference Tables

The annual lookup layer — every state rule the rest of the wiki defers to, in one refreshable place

Pillar: State Dimension · Applies to: Anyone checking how their state changes an answer given elsewhere in this wiki Type: Reference Last verified: August 2026 · Refresh cadence: Annual (January–February, after the bulk of legislative sessions and the January FPL release) + event-driven when a state changes a listed rule Related: ST-01 Six State Dimensions · ST-02 Retirement-Friendly States, Honestly · ST-03 Changing Domicile · HC-01 ACA Bridge · HC-02 Medicare 101 · HC-03 Medicaid Floor · TX-06 Senior Deduction & Bunching · EP-05 Estate & Inheritance Taxes

Verification legend: ✅ = confirmed against a primary or multiply-corroborated authoritative source during the August 2026 sweep · ◻️ = high confidence, confirm against the state’s own revenue, insurance, or Medicaid department before acting

Not advice. State law changes every legislative session, and this page will drift faster than any other in the wiki. Treat every table as a starting point for a lookup, not an answer. Where a row is ◻️, the state’s own agency is the authority — not this page and not a national summary.

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How to use this page

Eight of the wiki’s articles carry a State notes callout that ends by pointing here. Those callouts explain why a state dimension matters; this page holds the current values. The division is deliberate: mechanics articles stay evergreen while the volatile lists live in one file with one refresh date.

What this page deliberately does not do. It does not reproduce fifty rows for every dimension. Most state variation doesn’t change a decision — what changes decisions is membership in a small list (does my state tax Social Security? is there an estate tax? is there a birthday rule?). Where the list is short, it’s here in full. Where the answer is genuinely a fifty-way spread — marginal rates, property tax, benchmark ACA premiums — the page says so and sends you to the source, because a stale table is worse than no table.

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1. Income tax on retirement income

1.1 No state income tax (9 states)

Alaska · Florida · Nevada · New Hampshire · South Dakota · Tennessee · Texas · Washington · Wyoming ✅

Roth conversions, IRA and 401(k) withdrawals, pensions, and Social Security all come out state-free. Two asterisks:

State	Asterisk
New Hampshire	Its interest-and-dividends tax (RSA 77) is repealed for taxable periods beginning after 31 December 2024 ✅ — HB 2 (2023) accelerated it from 2026, and the rate had already stepped 5% → 4% → 3% on the way down. NH is now income-tax-free like the other eight; the asterisk is history, not a live rule
Washington	No income tax, but a 7% capital-gains excise tax on long-term gains above the standard deduction, $278,000 for tax year 2025 ✅, plus an additional 2.9% on gains above $1M — a 9.9% top rate, new for tax year 2025 ✅. Real estate is exempt ✅, as are retirement-account assets ✅. The deduction is indexed and DOR has not yet published the 2026 amount ◻️ (its table runs 2022 $250,000 · 2023 $262,000 · 2024 $270,000 · 2025 $278,000) — see TX-01 on why this caps a single-year harvest

These are the states where the TX-03 fill strategy and the SS-01 bridge-to-70 drawdown are cheapest, because every dollar of realized ordinary income is federal-only.

1.2 States that tax Social Security benefits (8 states)

Colorado · Connecticut · Minnesota · Montana · New Mexico · Rhode Island · Utah · Vermont ✅

The list shrinks almost every year — treat any list older than a session as wrong. West Virginia completed a three-year phase-out and does not tax benefits for tax year 2026, becoming the 42nd state to exempt them entirely; Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska dropped theirs in 2024. ✅

All eight remaining states gate the tax with income thresholds or partial exemptions, so a moderate-income retiree in one of them frequently owes nothing. The binary “does my state tax Social Security” is the wrong question; “does it tax mine, at my income, at my age” is the right one. Three checked at their own revenue departments in August 2026:

State	What it actually does
Colorado	Nothing, if you are 65 or older — the full federally-taxable benefit is subtracted ✅. Ages 55–64 also subtract it in full if AGI is ≤ $75,000 single / $95,000 joint (new for tax years from 1 Jan 2025); above that the subtraction caps at $20,000 ✅
Connecticut	Benefits fully exempt below federal AGI of $75,000 single/MFS and $100,000 joint/HoH ✅. Above those lines a partial deduction applies, via a worksheet DRS does not reduce to a single percentage ◻️
New Mexico	Exempt below $100,000 single · $150,000 joint/surviving spouse/HoH · $75,000 MFS ✅

Colorado is the case that shows why the list misleads. It appears on every “states that tax Social Security” list, and for this wiki’s traditional-retiree audience it taxes none of it — the age-65 subtraction is unconditional, with no income test at all. Membership on the list tells you almost nothing about your bill.

Montana · Minnesota · Rhode Island · Utah · Vermont are still ◻️ — each gates differently (age, AGI, or a credit that phases out), and none of the three checked above predicts the other five.

1.3 States that tax wages but exempt essentially all retirement income

Illinois · Pennsylvania · Mississippi ✅

For a retiree these can beat a no-income-tax state on total cost, since they fund themselves less aggressively through property and sales tax. Many other states offer partial pension or retirement-income exclusions, usually age- and amount-gated ◻️ — a genuine fifty-way spread, so check the state’s own schedule.

1.4 Community property (9 states)

Arizona · California · Idaho · Louisiana · Nevada · New Mexico · Texas · Washington · Wisconsin ✅

At the first spouse’s death both halves of community property step up in basis, not just the decedent’s — the single most valuable basis event most couples never plan around (TX-01 §7, TX-03 §5). Alaska, Tennessee, and South Dakota offer opt-in community-property trusts ◻️.

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2. Estate and inheritance tax

12 states plus DC levy an estate tax; 5 states levy an inheritance tax; Maryland levies both. ✅ The federal exemption is $15M per person (FN-02), so for most households in the $2–10M band the state layer is the only estate tax that will ever apply.

2.1 Estate tax (paid by the estate)

Every amount below was read at the jurisdiction’s own revenue department in the August 2026 sweep.

Jurisdiction	2026 exemption	Top rate
Oregon	$1,000,000 ✅	10%–16% ✅
Rhode Island	$1,838,056 ✅ (indexed; $1,802,431 in 2025)	16% ◻️
Massachusetts	$2,000,000 ✅ (threshold; the tax is computed via a $99,600 credit) ✅	16% ✅
Minnesota	$3,000,000 ✅ (fixed, not indexed)	13%–16% ✅
Washington	$3,000,000 ✅ (frozen — indexing broken by SB 6347)	20% ✅
Illinois	$4,000,000 ✅ (fixed)	16% ◻️
District of Columbia	$4,988,400 ✅ (indexed; $4,873,200 in 2025)	16% ◻️
Maryland	$5,000,000 ✅ (fixed since 2019)	16% ✅
Vermont	$5,000,000 ✅ (fixed since 2021)	16% ◻️ (32 V.S.A. §7442a)
Hawaii	$5,490,000 ✅ (decoupled from federal by Act 27, SLH 2018)	20% ✅ (over $10M)
Maine	$7,160,000 ✅ (indexed; $7,000,000 in 2025)	8%/10%/12% ✅
New York	$7,350,000 ✅ (indexed; $7,160,000 in 2025)	16% ◻️
Connecticut	$15,000,000 ✅ — not an independent figure: CT’s exemption is the federal basic exclusion amount, so it moves whenever FN-02 §8 moves	12% ◻️

Oregon’s $1M is the trap this table exists for — a paid-off house and a 401(k) clear it. Portability between spouses is not available at the state level in most estate-tax states (unlike federal), so an unplanned first death can waste an entire exemption; credit-shelter planning is the remedy → EP-05. The two exceptions are Maryland — which also allows a portability-only return up to two years after death — and Hawaii, whose Form M-6 instructions carry the full federal DSUE mechanics ✅. Illinois states the negative explicitly — “the portability and carry-over of the unused federal exemption to the surviving spouse is inapplicable” ✅ — and the remaining states have no equivalent provision ◻️.

Two 2025–26 bills would have moved lines in this table, and neither passed. Oregon SB 1511 would have raised the $1M threshold to $2.5M and indexed it — listed by Oregon DOR under Notable Bills Not Passed ✅. Maine LD 1617 would have cut Maine’s exclusion from $7M to $1,000,000; it died Ought Not to Pass on 28 May 2025 ✅. Both appear in search results as though they were law, and the Maine one nearly entered this page that way. Illinois has live bills proposing $8M and $12.06M ◻️. A bill is not a rule — check the disposition, not the summary.

Washington moved twice in thirteen months (historical). SB 5813 raised the exclusion to $3M and the top rate to 35% for deaths on or after July 1, 2025; SB 6347 (signed March 2026) restored the 10%–20% schedule for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, kept the $3M exclusion, and re-tied indexing to the discontinued Seattle–Tacoma–Bremerton CPI — freezing the exclusion at $3,000,000 ✅. So the 35% rate applied to a twelve-month window only, and the indexed $3,076,000 exclusion applied only through June 30, 2026. (Washington DOR’s rate-table page files “July 1, 2026 and after” under the legacy $2,193,000 exclusion heading; that heading tracks the rate schedule, not the exclusion — DOR’s main estate tax page states $3,000,000. Read the two pages together.)

2.2 Inheritance tax (paid by the heir, by relationship class)

State	Rates	Notes
Pennsylvania	0% spouse/minor child · 4.5% adult children · 12% siblings · 15% others ✅	No blanket exemption; the clearest relationship ladder
New Jersey	11–16% for taxed classes ◻️	Children and spouses exempt; siblings and non-relatives taxed. NJ repealed its estate tax in 2018 — the inheritance tax survives, a distinction national summaries routinely get wrong ✅
Kentucky	4–16% for distant beneficiaries ◻️	Small exemptions by class
Nebraska	1% / 11% / 15% by class ◻️	Class exemptions roughly $100k / $40k / $25k ◻️
Maryland	10% for non-spouse/non-descendant ◻️	Also has an estate tax ✅

The planning consequence: leaving assets to siblings, nieces/nephews, or friends is materially more expensive than leaving them to a spouse or children in these five states. Beneficiary design, not just document design (EP-01).

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3. Medicaid expansion and the ACA floor

40 states plus DC have expanded Medicaid; 10 have not. ✅ North Carolina was the most recent to expand (late 2023); none expanded in 2024 or 2025.

3.1 The 10 non-expansion states

Alabama · Florida · Georgia · Kansas · Mississippi · South Carolina · Tennessee · Texas · Wisconsin · Wyoming ✅

In these states a childless, non-disabled adult under 100% FPL usually falls into the coverage gap — too rich for Medicaid, too poor for premium tax credits (HC-03 §2). Two partial cases: Wisconsin covers adults to 100% FPL via waiver, so it has no true gap, and Georgia runs a limited work-conditioned program ◻️.

3.2 Your effective income floor, by jurisdiction type

Your state is…	Floor you must clear for a subsidized marketplace plan
Expansion, no Basic Health Program	138% FPL ✅
Basic Health Program: MN · OR · NY · DC	200% FPL ✅ — BHP eligibility blocks the premium tax credit whether or not you enroll (26 CFR §1.36B-2)
Non-expansion	100% FPL ✅ — below it, the coverage gap

Dollar figures for each line, by household size, live in FN-02. The mechanics and the manufacture-MAGI strategy live in HC-03.

Live watch item: Medicaid community-engagement (work) requirements take effect January 1, 2027, but a state may seek a good-faith-effort exemption deferring to December 31, 2028, and 25 states plus DC are litigating provisions of the rule. Your state’s posture, not the federal date, governs you. → FN-03 §4

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4. Marketplace type and state subsidy programs

4.1 Who runs your exchange (2026 plan year)

Type	Count	Who
Full state-based marketplace (SBM)	21 (20 states + DC) ✅	CA, CO, CT, DC, GA, ID, IL, KY, ME, MD, MA, MN, NV, NJ, NM, NY, PA, RI, VT, VA, WA
State-based using the federal platform (SBM-FP)	2 ✅	Arkansas, Oregon
Federally facilitated (HealthCare.gov)	28 ✅	The remainder

Illinois is new for 2026, having moved from SBM-FP to a full state exchange (Get Covered Illinois). ✅ SBM states set their own enrollment deadlines, which do not track HealthCare.gov’s — a live distinction while the federal open-enrollment window is in litigation (FN-03 §3, HC-01 §7).

4.2 State premium and cost-sharing subsidies

With the enhanced federal credits expired, several states are spending their own money to blunt the loss. This is the most volatile table on the page — these are appropriations, and they are re-decided every budget cycle. ◻️

State	2026 approach
New Mexico	Went furthest — state funds covering the expired federal subsidies in full for nearly all enrollees (~$22.3M general + $17.3M emergency)
California	Fully replaces lost credits up to 150% FPL; partial replacement 150–165% FPL
Colorado	Restructured from cost-sharing to premium support: up to $80/mo first household member, $29/mo each additional
Washington	Cascade Care Savings — flat $55 PMPM ($250 if ineligible for federal subsidies)
Vermont	Reduces the applicable percentage by 1.5 percentage points
Connecticut · Maryland · Massachusetts	Enhanced state subsidies offsetting part of the federal reduction
New York · New Jersey	Long-standing state subsidy programs, not tied to the enhanced-PTC expiration

Check your own exchange even if you fail the federal test — several of these survive above the 400% FPL federal cliff (HC-01 §7).

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5. Medigap switching rights

Federal law guarantees Medigap issue only during your 6-month one-time open enrollment after Part B starts, plus a short list of guaranteed-issue events (HC-02 §3). What happens after that is entirely state law, and it decides whether the Medicare Advantage “one-way door” exists for you.

Protection	States
Year-round guaranteed issue / continuous open enrollment	Connecticut · New York · Vermont ◻️ · Massachusetts (continuous OE with its own standardized plan set) ◻️ · Maine (protections for those with continuous coverage) ◻️
“Birthday rule” — an annual window to switch without underwriting, on terms that differ materially by state (below)	CA · DE · ID · IL · IN · KY · LA · MD · NV · OK · OR · UT · VA · WV · WY
Year-round plan switching for existing Medigap holders	Washington ◻️
Everywhere else	Medical underwriting applies after your windows lapse — the door closes

“Birthday rule” is a label, not a rule. The four states checked at their own insurance departments in August 2026 have four different rules, and the differences decide whether the window is worth anything to you:

State	Window	Restriction
Oregon	30 days, starting on your birthday	Same or lesser benefits; any insurer ✅
Illinois	45 days, from your birthdate	Ages 65–75 only — it ends at 76 — and only with your existing company or an Illinois-authorised affiliate, so you cannot shop the market ✅ (Public Act 103-0747; the affiliate expansion is new for 1/1/2026)
California	60 days, starting on your birthday	Equal or lesser benefits; insurer must notify you 30–60 days beforehand ✅ (extended from 30 days by SB 407, 2019)
Idaho	63 days, starting on your birthday	Comparable or lesser coverage; same or another company ✅ (since 1 March 2022)

The remaining eleven are ◻️ — assume nothing from this table about them. A spread of 30 to 63 days, with one state capping the right at 76 and confining it to a single insurer, is not a category you can generalise across.

So the count is the wrong question. This page used to note that “16 states” were reported for 2026 while only 15 could be named; chasing the sixteenth is less useful than it looks, because a state can appear on the list and still give you almost nothing. Ask what your state’s window actually permits — length, age limit, and whether you may change carriers — not whether your state is on a list.

If you are choosing between Medigap and Medicare Advantage at 65, this section is worth more than any premium comparison — but state the reversibility claim carefully. In a year-round guaranteed-issue state the MA decision is genuinely reversible. In a birthday-rule state it is reversible on that state’s terms: an Illinois resident who takes Medicare Advantage at 65 and wants Medigap back at 77 has no birthday window at all, and an Oregonian has 30 days a year to act in. Everywhere else, medical underwriting decides.

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6. The annual refresh checklist

Work this list each January–February, after most legislative sessions have adjourned and the new HHS poverty guidelines have landed.

• §1.2 Social Security taxation — the fastest-moving list here; check for new repeals and phase-out completions
• §1.1 — confirm no state has adopted or repealed an income tax; re-check WA’s indexed capital-gains excise threshold
• §2 — estate exemptions are indexed in several states; re-pull every amount, and watch for legislated changes (WA moved twice: July 2025 and again July 2026)
• §3.1 — expansion status; §3.2 — any new or terminated Basic Health Program (DC’s began Jan 2026; NY’s waiver ended July 2026)
• §4.1 — marketplace-type changes take effect with the plan year; §4.2 — re-verify every subsidy program against the state’s enacted budget
• §5 — check for newly enacted birthday rules, and re-read the terms of the ones already listed: Illinois changed its rule for 1/1/2026 (Public Act 103-0747 widened it from the issuer to its affiliates) without joining or leaving the list, which a membership-only check cannot see. Eleven of the fifteen are still ◻️
• Update this page’s Last verified date and add a Change log row; then sweep the eight State notes callouts that point here for anything now contradicted

Primary sources, by section: state departments of revenue (§1, §2); state Medicaid agencies and KFF’s expansion tracker (§3); CMS and each state exchange (§4); state departments of insurance (§5). National summaries are useful for finding which states to check and unreliable for what the rule is — the New Jersey estate-versus-inheritance confusion in §2.2 was found exactly that way during this sweep.

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Change log

Date	Change
Aug 2026	§1.2 — the eight-state list is true and misleading, and Colorado proves it. Three of the eight read at their revenue departments: Colorado subtracts the entire federally-taxable benefit for anyone 65 or older with no income test at all ✅ (ages 55–64 get the same if AGI ≤ $75,000/$95,000, new from 1 Jan 2025; otherwise a $20,000 cap), Connecticut exempts benefits fully below federal AGI $75,000 single / $100,000 joint ✅, New Mexico below $100,000 / $150,000 / $75,000 MFS ✅. So a Colorado retiree aged 65 — squarely this wiki’s traditional audience — pays nothing, in a state every ranking lists as taxing Social Security. The page already said the binary was the wrong question but gave no thresholds to replace it with, which left the correction unusable; the three checked states are now stated, the question is sharpened to include age, and ST-01 carries the Colorado instance. Montana, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont stay ◻️ — they gate by age, AGI or a phasing credit in ways the three checked do not predict.
Aug 2026	§1.1 — both asterisks closed, and one of them was a year-stamping failure worth naming. New Hampshire’s interest-and-dividends tax is repealed for taxable periods beginning after 31 December 2024 ✅ (RSA 77; HB 2 of 2023 accelerated it from 2026, after the rate stepped 5% → 4% → 3%), so the asterisk is history rather than a live rule. Washington’s ~$278k was the 2025 figure presented as current. Washington DOR’s own table runs 2022 $250,000 · 2023 $262,000 · 2024 $270,000 · 2025 $278,000 and stops there — the 2026 amount is not yet published, which is the honest thing to say and was not being said. Rate structure confirmed: 7%, plus 2.9% above $1M for a 9.9% top rate (new for tax year 2025), real estate and retirement-account assets exempt ✅. The figure had four copies — here, FN-02, TX-01 and HC-06 — all spelled ~$278k, which the canonical matcher cannot see, because it rejects magnitude suffixes. All four normalised to $278,000 and the figure declared as F2025.WA_CAPGAINS_DEDUCTION, so the refresh now names every carrier when DOR publishes the 2026 amount instead of relying on someone remembering. A duplicated figure written in shorthand is a figure outside the machinery, which is the same lesson as the Connecticut row from a different angle.
Aug 2026	§5 — “birthday rule” was one label over four different rules, and the page was generalising across them. Four states read at their own insurance departments: Oregon 30 days (any insurer), Illinois 45 days but only ages 65–75 and only with your existing company or an Illinois-authorised affiliate, California 60 days (extended from 30 by SB 407), Idaho 63 days (since March 2022). The Illinois restrictions are the finding: this page listed it flat among fifteen states and then told readers that in a birthday-rule state “the MA decision is substantially reversible” — which is false for an Illinois resident at 76, who has no window at all, and overstated for an Oregonian, who has 30 days a year. Corrected here, and the same overstatement corrected in ST-01 (which carried it verbatim) and HC-02’s State notes. The count question is retired as the wrong question: this page used to flag “16 reported, 15 named,” but a state can be on the list and give you almost nothing, so what to look up is the terms — length, age limit, whether you may change carriers. The other eleven stay ◻️, and the new table says outright that nothing about them should be inferred from the four.
Aug 2026	§2.1 swept at source — all 13 jurisdictions, one wrong. Every exemption amount was read at the jurisdiction’s own revenue department (Oregon DOR, RI Division of Taxation, Mass DOR, MN DOR, IL Attorney General, DC OTR, Comptroller of Maryland, VT Dept. of Taxes, Hawaii DOTAX, Maine Revenue Services, NY Dept. of Taxation and Finance, CT DRS), closing ten ◻️. Connecticut was wrong: $13,600,000 against an actual $15,000,000, confirmed in the 2026 Form CT-706 NT instructions. The cause is worth more than the fix — CT’s exemption is defined as the federal basic exclusion amount, so it is a pointer, not a figure. Recording it as a literal amount guaranteed it would go stale when the federal number moved, and it had already moved twice: $13,610,000 was the 2024 federal figure, and FN-02 §8 has carried $15,000,000 the whole time. The corpus disagreed with itself across two pages and nothing could see it, because a state figure carried by one article gets no canonical row. The row now states the rule instead of the amount — and the corpus had already run the experiment: EP-05’s State notes call it “Connecticut’s federal-tracking figure” and ST-01 “figures near the federal level in Connecticut,” and both stayed correct through two federal indexation cycles while the page that wrote the number went stale. Storing the pointer is not a stylistic preference; it is the only version that survived. Rhode Island was rounded ($1,838,000 → $1,838,056 — real money at the margin of a threshold). Rates upgraded where the department publishes them: Oregon 10–16%, Minnesota 13–16%, Maine 8/10/12%, Hawaii 20% over $10M, Massachusetts and Maryland 16%. Vermont’s flat rate stays ◻️ — legislature.vermont.gov serves an incomplete certificate chain and TLS verification is never to be disabled, so the pointer to 32 V.S.A. §7442a is the honest mark.
Aug 2026	Near-miss worth recording (§2.1). A maine.gov-domain search result stated Maine’s 2026 exclusion had been cut from $7M to $1,000,000. It is a bill — LD 1617, which Maine Revenue Services testified against and which died Ought Not to Pass. Had it been believed, this page would have told every Maine reader with a $2M estate they owed a tax they do not owe, in the section that exists to catch exactly that. The existing rule said national summaries are unreliable for what the rule is; the sharper rule is that a government domain is not a safety net either — legislative testimony, fiscal notes and bill text all live on state servers and all describe law that does not exist. Oregon SB 1511 and two Illinois bills have the same shape. Resolution came from the disposition record, not from another summary.
Aug 2026	Correction (§2.1) — the blanket claim that state-level portability “is generally not available” was an overgeneralisation. Maryland and Hawaii both permit it by statute ✅ — Maryland via Form MET-1, uniquely allowing a portability-only return up to two years after death; Hawaii via Part 2 of Form M-6 on the ordinary nine-month deadline. The remaining estate-tax states have no equivalent ◻️. Found by an external audit of EP-05; corrected here, in ST-01, and in EP-05.
Aug 2026	Correction (§2.1) — Washington was carried as “~$3,080,000 ◻️, top rate 20% ◻️.” Both are now ✅ and the exclusion figure was wrong: SB 6347 froze it at $3,000,000 effective July 1, 2026 by re-tying indexing to a discontinued CPI series, so the indexed $3,076,000 applied only through June 30, 2026. The 20% top rate happened to be right, but for the wrong reason — it was carried over from the pre-2025 schedule while the 35% rate was actually in force, and only became correct again when SB 6347 restored the old brackets. FN-02 carried the 35% figure and has been corrected in the same commit.
Aug 2026	Page created. Verified during the sweep: the Social Security list is 8 states (a widely repeated “nine” is stale — it counts West Virginia, whose phase-out completed for 2026); estate tax is 12 states + DC, inheritance 5 states, Maryland both, and New Jersey has inheritance but not estate tax — a distinction several national summaries get wrong. Illinois became a full SBM for the 2026 plan year. Estate exemption amounts are largely ◻️ pending a per-state revenue-department pass; the membership lists are ✅.