What Vermont 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.
Vermont guide
On the ordinary retirement profile — $34,000 of Social Security and $61,000 of plan distributions — Vermont takes $4,664 a year in state income tax.
That is the number people compare, and it is the smallest of three. Property tax adds about $6,228 on the state's $423,700 median home, and insurance another $1,170. The three together come to $12,062, placing Vermont 48th of 50.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Every Vermont 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. Vermont is one of the small group of states still taxing Social Security. The exclusion is full below the threshold and phases out linearly over the next $10,000 of federal AGI, reaching zero at $65,000 (single, married filing separately, head of household, surviving spouse) and $80,000 (married filing jointly). The statutory formula is proportional rather than a cliff: the excluded percentage equals ($65,000 minus FAGI) divided by $10,000, times the federally taxable benefits, with $80,000 and the same $10,000 span for joint filers. Note the filing-status shape, which breaks two common assumptions: married filing separately gets the same $55,000 threshold as single rather than half of the joint figure, and head of household also gets $55,000 rather than an intermediate amount — Vermont's statute groups single, married filing separately, head of household, and surviving spouse together, and joint filers get $70,000, which is well short of double. These figures are current and the Department's own consumer page is not: see the sources entry for a documented disagreement between the statute and tax.vermont.gov.
Read the full Vermont guide →18 min read · Updated 2026-09-03