Most states with no income tax simply have no statute imposing one. Wyoming went further and wrote a statute saying nobody else may impose one either.
Title 39 of the Wyoming Statutes is captioned Taxation and Revenue. Chapter 7 is captioned Income Taxes, and it contains exactly one section: Wyo. Stat. 39-7-101, marked "Repealed By Laws 1998, ch. 5, sec. 4." An entire chapter reduced to a single repealed heading.
Then Chapter 12 does the rest of the work. Wyo. Stat. 39-12-101 provides that the state preempts for itself the field of imposing and levying income taxes, earnings taxes, or any other form of tax based on wages or other income — and that no county, city or town may impose one.
A single filer earning $85,000 in Wyoming takes home $68,628.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Federal figures are tax year 2026, from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and the Social Security Administration; Wyoming's position comes from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset, citing the official Title 39 compilation published by the Wyoming Legislative Service Office. Every dollar figure is computed by the same engine the site's calculators use, on a single filer taking the federal standard deduction with no dependents or pre-tax deferrals unless stated. Sales tax, property tax and severance taxes are discussed qualitatively.
1. What Wyoming takes from a paycheck: nothing
| Amount on $85,000 | |
|---|---|
| Gross salary | $85,000 |
| Federal income tax | −$9,870 |
| Social Security (6.2%) | −$5,270 |
| Medicare (1.45%) | −$1,233 |
| Wyoming income tax | $0 |
| Take-home | $68,628 |
Across incomes:
| Salary | Wyoming tax | Take-home |
|---|---|---|
| $30,000 | $0 | $25,285 |
| $45,000 | $0 | $38,338 |
| $60,000 | $0 | $50,390 |
| $85,000 | $0 | $68,628 |
| $120,000 | $0 | $93,250 |
| $175,000 | $0 | $130,879 |
No state return, no withholding line, no brackets.
See what your own salary leaves you in Wyoming2. Filing jointly
The single-filer figures above are the ones most often quoted. Here is the same salary as a married couple's sole income, filing jointly:
| Salary | Single take-home | Joint take-home | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $45,000 | $38,338 | $40,278 | +$1,940 |
| $85,000 | $68,628 | $72,658 | +$4,030 |
| $120,000 | $93,250 | $100,780 | +$7,530 |
| $175,000 | $130,879 | $140,773 | +$9,894 |
All of that difference is federal. In a state with graduated brackets, part of the joint-filing benefit comes from the state widening its own brackets for married couples — Oregon and Minnesota both do. In Wyoming there is no state layer to widen, so the entire gap is the federal standard deduction doubling and the federal brackets widening.
That has one consequence worth naming: the joint-filing benefit is the same dollar amount in Wyoming as in every other no-income-tax state, and smaller than in most taxing states. If you are comparing a move on the strength of filing jointly, the comparison is federal-versus-federal plus whatever the other state adds.
As a share of gross, the total tax rate:
| Salary | Single | Joint |
|---|---|---|
| $45,000 | 14.81% | 10.49% |
| $85,000 | 19.26% | 14.52% |
| $120,000 | 22.29% | 16.02% |
| $175,000 | 25.21% | 19.56% |
These are effective rates, not marginal ones — the share of the whole salary that leaves, not the rate charged on the last dollar. The two get confused constantly, and the effective rate is the one that tells you what you can spend.
3. What the paycheck actually looks like
Annual figures are useful for comparison and useless for budgeting. On $85,000 as a single filer in Wyoming:
| Pay schedule | Gross per cheque | Net per cheque |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly (52) | $1,634.62 | $1,319.76 |
| Biweekly (26) | $3,269.23 | $2,639.52 |
| Semi-monthly (24) | $3,541.67 | $2,859.48 |
| Monthly (12) | $7,083.33 | $5,718.96 |
Biweekly and semi-monthly are not the same thing, and the difference catches people out. Biweekly is 26 cheques a year — every other Friday — so two months in the year contain three paydays. Semi-monthly is 24 cheques, on fixed dates such as the 15th and the last day, so every month contains exactly two.
The annual total is identical. The monthly cash flow is not. A biweekly earner budgeting on "two paycheques a month" is under-counting by two cheques a year, which on $85,000 is $5,279 that arrives in two windfall months and is easy to spend without noticing.
Three more things a real pay stub adds that the table above does not:
Health insurance premiums, if taken pre-tax under a Section 125 plan, come off before tax and reduce FICA wages as well. A $400-a-month premium is $4,800 a year that never appears as taxable income.
Retirement deferrals reduce federal taxable income but not FICA wages, so the saving is your federal rate only.
Withholding is an estimate, not the tax. Your employer withholds based on the W-4 you filed. Over-withholding produces a refund; under-withholding produces a bill. Neither changes what you actually owe, which is what the figures above show.
Because Wyoming withholds nothing at state level, your pay stub has one fewer line than most Americans' and one fewer thing to get wrong. What pays for that is mineral severance taxes on coal, oil, gas and trona.
4. Preemption is a stronger answer than absence
It is worth spending a paragraph on why this distinction is not pedantry.
For most no-income-tax states, the honest form of the answer is negative: we searched the statutes and found nothing imposing one. That is a perfectly good answer, but it is an inference from absence, and absence is the hardest thing to prove.
Wyoming's answer is affirmative. A statute exists, it names the subject — income taxes, earnings taxes, and any other form of tax based on wages or other income — and it says the state occupies the field and local government may not enter it.
Three practical consequences:
No Wyoming county, city or town levies a wage tax, and none may. This is not "we checked all twenty-three counties." It is a single statutory sentence that resolves the whole question. Compare Kentucky, where local occupational license taxes on wages are near-universal, or Ohio, where the municipal rate depends on which suburb you live in.
A repealed chapter is not a dormant rate. Chapter 7 was not set to zero; its only section was repealed in 1998. There is no machinery left to reactivate by amendment of a rate.
A Wyoming take-home figure needs no local asterisk, and that is provable rather than assumed.
5. What the zero is worth
| Compared with | Their tax on $85,000 | Wyoming keeps you |
|---|---|---|
| Utah | $3,685 | +$3,685 |
| Idaho | $3,519 | +$3,519 |
| Montana | $3,442 | +$3,442 |
| Colorado | $3,032 | +$3,032 |
| Nebraska | $2,988 | +$2,988 |
| South Dakota | $0 | $0 |
Wyoming borders six states, and every one of them except South Dakota taxes income. The gaps cluster tightly — between $2,988 and $3,685 at $85,000 — because Wyoming's neighbours are mostly flat-rate or low-graduated states rather than high-tax ones.
Scaling:
| Salary | vs. Colorado | vs. Utah | vs. Montana |
|---|---|---|---|
| $45,000 | $1,272 | $1,385 | $1,358 |
| $85,000 | $3,032 | $3,685 | $3,442 |
| $175,000 | $6,992 | $7,788 | $8,527 |
Colorado and Utah both apply flat rates, so their gaps grow close to proportionally with income — though Utah's taxpayer tax credit, which phases out as income rises, makes its gap grow faster than the flat 4.45% alone suggests. Montana is graduated, which is why it starts as the smallest gap of the three at $45,000 and finishes as the largest at $175,000.
Colorado's gap is the smallest of the three at every level, and the reason is the base rather than the rate: Colorado's return starts from your federal taxable income, so the federal standard deduction is already subtracted before its 4.4% applies.
$3,032 a year against Colorado is $253 a month at $85,000, and $583 a month at $175,000. Real, and smaller than the gap a Nevada or Washington resident opens against California.
6. What Wyoming charges instead: minerals
Wyoming's revenue structure is closer to Alaska's than to Tennessee's or Texas's.
Mineral severance taxes — levied on coal, oil, natural gas and trona as they are extracted — plus federal mineral royalties and the ad valorem tax on mineral production, do a very large share of the work. Wyoming produces more coal than any other state and is a significant oil, gas and trona producer.
The consequence is that a substantial part of Wyoming's public revenue is paid by the extractive industry rather than by households, and ultimately by the national and international buyers of what is extracted. It is the same structural trick Alaska runs with oil and Nevada runs with tourism: export the tax burden.
The corollary is volatility. Revenue tracks commodity prices and production volumes, neither of which Wyoming controls. Coal's long-run trajectory in particular has been the dominant question in Wyoming fiscal policy for a decade. When mineral revenue falls, the pressure on the tax structure is real, and it is the reason a state sales tax increase or an income tax proposal surfaces in Cheyenne periodically.
Nothing has been enacted. As of tax year 2026 there is no Wyoming individual income tax, and Wyo. Stat. 39-12-101 stands.
Sales tax is low and groceries are exempt
Wyoming's state sales tax rate is among the lower ones in the country, and counties may add a small local option on top. Combined rates remain modest by national standards.
Food for domestic home consumption is exempt. That is a meaningful difference from South Dakota and Tennessee, both of which tax groceries, and it makes Wyoming's consumption tax noticeably less regressive than theirs.
So Wyoming is one of the few states where the no-income-tax headline is not substantially clawed back at the register. The money comes from minerals instead.
Property tax is modest for homeowners
Residential property in Wyoming is assessed at a fraction of fair market value, and effective rates on owner-occupied housing sit among the lower ones nationally.
Industrial and mineral property is assessed at a higher ratio, which is the mechanism by which extraction carries more of the local property tax load than households do.
For a homeowner, this is the important point: unlike Texas or New Hampshire, Wyoming did not replace an income tax with a heavy property tax. The trade is genuinely favourable on the residential side.
7. The federal share
| Amount | Share of gross | |
|---|---|---|
| Federal income tax | $9,870 | 11.61% |
| FICA | $6,503 | 7.65% |
| Wyoming income tax | $0 | 0% |
| Total | $16,373 | 19.26% |
FICA still starts at the first dollar
Someone earning $12,000 in Wyoming owes no federal income tax and still pays $918 in Social Security and Medicare. With groceries exempt from sales tax and residential property tax low, that $918 is a larger share of a low earner's total tax bill in Wyoming than in almost any other state.
8. Retirees
Wyoming taxes no retirement income of any kind. Social Security, pensions, 401(k) and IRA distributions, interest and dividends are all untaxed. There is no estate or inheritance tax.
And unusually, the offsets are mild too. Groceries are exempt from sales tax, the general sales tax rate is low, and residential property tax is modest. The pattern that undercuts other no-income-tax states for retirees — Texas's and New Hampshire's property tax, Tennessee's grocery tax — is largely absent here.
Wyoming is consistently near the top of retirement tax rankings for exactly this reason, and the ranking survives scrutiny better than most.
The genuine costs are non-tax: distance to specialist healthcare, winter, and thin markets for services in much of the state. Those are real and they are what people actually weigh.
9. What you can still control
Every lever is federal.
Pre-tax deferrals save your federal rate only. A $10,000 traditional 401(k) contribution saves an $85,000 earner $2,200 federally. In Colorado or Utah the same deferral would save roughly $440 more in state tax. Tax-deferred saving is worth less in Wyoming — still worth doing, and the total benefit is smaller.
HSA contributions through payroll cut FICA as well as federal income tax. That 7.65% saving is state-independent, so it is a larger share of the total benefit here than in a taxing state.
Roth versus traditional loses its state-tax argument. No rate to deduct against now, none to pay later — the decision rests on federal considerations alone.
Capital gains and dividends are untaxed at state level too, which matters for anyone with a substantial taxable brokerage account. Realising a large gain in Wyoming costs federal tax only, where the same sale in Colorado or Utah would add a flat state rate on top of it. For a one-off event — a business sale, a concentrated position unwound — that difference can be large in a single year, and it is one of the more common genuine reasons for establishing Wyoming residency.
10. Working across a state line
If you live in Wyoming and physically work in Colorado, Utah, Montana, Idaho or Nebraska, that state generally taxes the income as nonresident source income. Wyoming offers no credit, because Wyoming levies nothing to credit against — so you bear the other state's tax in full.
If you live in Wyoming and work remotely for an out-of-state employer, income is generally sourced where the work is performed, so a Wyoming desk usually means no state income tax. Check whether the employer's state applies a convenience-of-the-employer rule; New York's is the best known.
If you live in Colorado and work in Wyoming, Colorado taxes you. Wyoming's zero does not follow you home. This matters on the Front Range corridor, where the border is close and the commute is real.
11. Residency, and the reason it gets scrutinised
Wyoming attracts residency claims for reasons beyond the income tax — its trust and LLC law is well known — and that attention cuts both ways.
Residency is about where you actually live, not where an entity is registered. Driver's licence, voter registration, where your permanent home is, where you spend your days, where your family is. A state you left will look at all of it.
A high-tax state losing a high earner will examine the claim. California and New York in particular pursue residency questions with resources, and the amounts compound across years.
If you are establishing Wyoming residency around a large one-off gain, that is precisely the fact pattern that draws scrutiny, and it is worth professional advice rather than assumption.
12. Moving to Wyoming
The income tax saving is $2,988 to $3,685 a year at $85,000 depending on which neighbour you are leaving, and roughly double that at $175,000.
Unusually, very little of it comes back. Low sales tax, groceries exempt, modest residential property tax. Wyoming is one of the few states where the headline zero survives the offsets largely intact, because minerals pay the bill instead of households.
The costs are non-tax. Distance, winter, thin service markets, and a job market concentrated in a small number of industries in most of the state. Compare the offer and the life, not the tax rate.
Housing costs vary enormously — Teton County is one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, and the rest of Wyoming is not. A statewide average tells you nothing useful about either.
Frequently asked questions
Does Wyoming have a state income tax? No. Title 39's income tax chapter contains a single section marked "Repealed By Laws 1998," and Wyo. Stat. 39-12-101 preempts the field of income taxation for the state.
What is take-home pay on $85,000 in Wyoming? $68,628 for a single filer taking the standard deduction, after $9,870 federal income tax and $6,503 FICA.
Can a Wyoming county or town tax my income? No, and this is expressly barred rather than merely absent. Wyo. Stat. 39-12-101 provides that no county, city or town may impose any tax based on wages or other income.
How much does Wyoming save me against Colorado? $3,032 a year at $85,000 and $6,992 at $175,000 — the smallest gap of Wyoming's six neighbours, because Colorado's rate applies to federal taxable income rather than to gross. Against Utah it is $3,685 and $7,788; against Montana $3,442 and $8,527.
What does Wyoming charge instead? Mineral severance taxes on coal, oil, gas and trona, plus federal mineral royalties and ad valorem taxes on mineral production. Sales tax is levied at one of the lower rates in the country with groceries exempt, and residential property tax is modest.
Are groceries taxed in Wyoming? No. Food for domestic home consumption is exempt from sales tax, which makes Wyoming's consumption tax substantially less regressive than South Dakota's or Tennessee's.
Does Wyoming tax retirement income? No — Social Security, pensions, 401(k) and IRA distributions and investment income are all untaxed, and there is no estate or inheritance tax. Unusually, the sales and property tax offsets are mild as well.
Does Wyoming tax capital gains? Not at state level. A large realised gain costs federal tax only, where the same sale in Colorado or Utah would carry a flat state rate on top. This is one of the more common genuine reasons people establish Wyoming residency — and precisely the fact pattern a former home state will scrutinise.
What to do next
Wyoming's paycheck answer is a clean zero, barred at the local level by statute, and unusually well protected from the offsets that erode the headline elsewhere.
- Wyoming take-home pay calculator — your salary with every federal deduction shown separately.
- Your Paycheck in the USA in 2026 — all fifty states on one salary.
- Take-Home Pay in South Dakota — the other no-income-tax neighbour, with a much broader sales tax.
- Wyoming rent affordability — what the take-home actually supports.
- 50/30/20 budget calculator — built on take-home rather than salary.
Every figure on this site is sourced and dated. How we source every number.
Figures in this article are illustrations computed by this site's own tax engine for tax year 2026, on a single filer taking the federal standard deduction with no dependents or pre-tax deferrals unless stated. Federal figures come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and the Social Security Administration; Wyoming's position from this site's sourced 50-state dataset, citing the official Wyoming Statutes Title 39 compilation published by the Wyoming Legislative Service Office. Sales tax, property tax and severance taxes are discussed qualitatively rather than computed. This is general education and not tax advice; for residency questions in particular, consult a licensed tax professional.