Twenty States Cut Their Top Income Tax Rate Between 2022 and 2026

Between tax year 2022 and tax year 2026, 20 of the 51 US income tax jurisdictions cut their top marginal personal income tax rate. Three raised theirs. Twenty-eight left it unchanged — and nine of those have no personal income tax to change.

Every rate below is computed from the tables that power the TaxMath calculator, so any row can be checked against that jurisdiction's tax table page. One row is a judgment call rather than a lookup. California's schedule reads 12.3% at the top for 2022 and 13.30% for 2026, but California's law did not move: the extra point is the Mental Health Services Tax that R&TC §17043 has imposed on taxable income over $1,000,000 since it took effect on January 1, 2005, and our earlier tables omitted it. California is counted below as unchanged, and the omission is logged in Corrections.

The 20 states that cut

Ranked by the size of the cut, in percentage points.

Iowa is the outlier by a factor of two. Its top rate fell from 8.53% to 3.80%, a move of −4.73 percentage points, as a nine-band schedule collapsed into a single rate. The Department of Revenue states the 2026 position in one sentence: "Since the enactment of Iowa Senate File 2442 in May 2024, Iowa law provides for a flat tax rate of 3.8 percent," and all levels of taxable income are subject to it. No other jurisdiction in the table travelled even half as far.

Kansas anchors the other end. Its −0.12 is the smallest move in the table, and it is the row where the top rate tells you least about the bill. Senate Bill 1 of the 2024 Special Session replaced three brackets with two, and the Department of Revenue prints the new schedule for a single filer as a formula: 5.2% of Kansas taxable income up to $23,000, then $1,196 plus 5.58% of the excess. The same bill raised the bottom rate from 3.1% and lifted the single filer's standard deduction and personal exemption from a combined $5,750 to $12,765. Run $100,000 through both years' tables and the 2026 bill lands about $134 lower. Real money, and not the sort of change anyone relocates over.

The three states that raised

All three increases sit at the very top of the schedule, and not one of them is a broad-based rate rise. A Massachusetts filer on $150,000 pays the same 5% charged in 2022, because the 9.00% in the column reaches only the slice above $1,107,750. Maine left every bracket where it was and added a surcharge above it. Maryland's two new bands start at half a million dollars. Read the column without reading the mechanism beside it and all three states look like places that raised taxes on you.

Four states abandoned graduated brackets

Arizona, Georgia, Iowa and Louisiana each replaced a graduated schedule with one rate inside this window; the 2022 and 2026 schedules sit side by side on their tax table pages. Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana and Utah were already flat in 2022 and stayed flat while cutting.

Flattening is the practical route to a lower headline number, because lowering one rate is a simpler act than rewriting a schedule, and it removes the mechanism by which a graduated system asks more of higher incomes. What replaces that mechanism is the deduction. Georgia's move to 4.99% arrived alongside a standard deduction the Department of Revenue puts at $15,000 for single filers, which is what decides whether a flat rate lands as a cut or a rise at the bottom of the schedule.

What the top rate does not tell you

Arkansas makes the case better than any argument could. Its −2.00 is the third-largest cut in the table, and the schedule beneath its 3.70% top rate is not a bracket ladder at all. Act 2 of the 2026 First Extraordinary Session gives Arkansas two separate tables: a five-band graduated one for net income at or below $94,700, and a two-line one above it that charges 2% on the first $4,700 and 3.70% on everything else. Crossing $94,700 therefore reprices almost every dollar a filer earns rather than the last one, and the Act smooths that step with a 29-row ladder of "bracket adjustment amounts" running from $290 down to nothing between $94,701 and $97,600. No other state's top rate behaves like that.

Three more reasons the headline rate is the wrong number to compare:

1. It may reach almost nobody. Maine's 9.15% and Massachusetts' 9.00% both begin above a million dollars of taxable income. For nearly every filer in those states the operative rates are Maine's 7.15% and Massachusetts' 5%.
2. Where the bracket starts matters more than where it ends. A 5% rate charged from the first dollar costs a middle-income filer more than a 9% rate charged from the millionth.
3. The deduction moves the whole curve. Kansas is its own demonstration: nearly the same top rate in both years, a different bill, because 2026 shields $12,765 before the first rate applies where 2022 shielded $5,750.

The number that settles an argument is what a specific income owes in a specific state. The 2026 fleet ranking computes it for a $65,000 single filer in all 51 jurisdictions, and the answer looks nothing like this article's table. California has the highest top rate in the country at 13.30% and ranks 21st cheapest for that filer. Oregon, whose top rate is lower at 9.90%, ranks 51st and charges the same filer more than two and a half times as much.

Data note

Rates here are the top marginal rate on ordinary income for a single filer, taken from the TaxMath tables for tax years 2022 and 2026. Local income taxes, New York City's among them, are excluded, as are payroll, sales and property taxes. Income tax alone is not a burden ranking. The Tax Foundation's state-and-local burden estimates, a calendar-2022 measure, run from 15.9% of income in New York to 4.6% in Alaska, on a basis this table does not attempt.

The standard outside reference for this material is the Tax Foundation's fifty-state rate table, and the edition on its site is "State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets, 2025," stated as of January 1, 2025. It checks none of the 2026 figures above, because it does not carry one.

In the "2026 data" column, a jurisdiction reads provisional when the enacted law is known but the revenue department has not published its own tables for that year. Arkansas is the live example: its 3.70% comes from Act 2 above, which applies to tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2026, while the Department of Finance and Administration's individual income tax page still offers forms through 2025 and no 2026 table. Across all 51 jurisdictions, 28 carry final 2026 figures and 23 do not. Which states are still pending, and what each is waiting on, is on the 2026 data status board.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax advice. Consult a qualified tax professional for guidance specific to your situation.