What New Jersey actually takes from a 401(k) withdrawal, a pension, and Social Security — in dollars, against the state’s own brackets and exclusions rather than a yes-or-no list.
Long-term index-fund growth after expense-ratio drag — and what your state takes from the gains at withdrawal.
When your RMDs start under SECURE 2.0, how much this year's is, and what missing it costs.
2026 limits, employer match, the 60-63 super catch-up, and whether the Roth catch-up mandate applies to you.
A required minimum distribution is ordinary income, taxed at your top bracket and often pushing you into the next one. Here is the federal tax on RMDs from $20,000 to $75,000 at different income levels, why the default 10% withholding usually leaves a bill, how to avoid an underpayment penalty, and the three side effects that make the real rate higher than the bracket.
The required minimum distribution on every common balance at every age from 73 to 95, worked from the IRS table, plus what happens to the account over twenty years of withdrawals at 0%, 5% and 7% returns. The short version: the share you must take rises every year, and at good returns the dollar amount keeps rising with it.
What moving actually saves, on your own income mix rather than a headline rate — and how to establish domicile so the state you left cannot follow you.
Which account to draw first, priced. The three cliffs a withdrawal can cross without warning, the conversion window almost nobody uses, and why the order is the last big decision you can still change.
New Jersey guide
On the ordinary retirement profile — $34,000 of Social Security and $61,000 of plan distributions — New Jersey takes $0 a year in state income tax.
That is the number people compare, and it is the smallest of three. Property tax adds about $10,395 on the state's $550,000 median home, and insurance another $1,480. The three together come to $11,875, placing New Jersey 47th of 50.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Every New Jersey figure comes from this site's own fifty-state income-tax dataset and its retirement tax engine, computed for a single filer aged 70 unless stated otherwise; property tax, median home price and insurance figures come from the site's core state dataset. Rates are for tax year 2026. Property tax is assessed locally in most states, so the effective rate here is a statewide figure rather than your county's.
On Social Security. 100% exempt with no conditions of any kind. N.J.S.A. 54A:6-2, quoted complete and never amended since 1976: 'All payments received under the Federal Social Security Act, whether they be regularly monthly benefits or lump sum death benefits.' No provisional-income formula, no phase-in, no income cap, no age test. Railroad Retirement gets identical treatment at 54A:6-3, both tiers. A consequence that matters for the pension exclusion below: because Social Security is never reported at all, it does not enter NJ-1040 line 27 and therefore does not count toward the $150,000 income test that gates the pension exclusion. That is a large and favourable divergence from the federal treatment, and from most states in the fifty-state dataset.
On 401(k) and IRA distributions. New Jersey's pension and retirement income exclusion, N.J.S.A. 54A:6-10 — available at age 62 or over, or on Social Security-defined disability, with income of $150,000 or less. Note the status split: head-of-household takes the single amount here ($75,000), even though it uses the joint bracket schedule. Between $100,001 and $150,000 of income the exclusion becomes a percentage of the taxpayer's pension payments, not of the maximum exclusion and not of gross income — 50% then 25% for married-joint, 37.5% then 18.75% for single and head-of-household, 25% then 12.5% for married-separate, across the $100,001-$125,000 and $125,001-$150,000 bands. There is no dollar cap in that range, so a married-joint filer with $105,000 of income all from pension excludes $52,500, which is more than the naive reading of a phase-out would suggest and less than the full $100,000. Above $150,000 there is a genuine cliff to zero, which the record does capture.
Read the full New Jersey guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-09-03