Compare two states, number by number.

Income, property, sales and estate tax. Cost of living, crime, healthcare, housing, gun laws. Pick any two of the 50 states.

Each comparison puts two states side by side on the numbers that decide a move: what a median household pays in income, property and sales tax, the cost of living index and median home price, violent crime per 100,000, life expectancy and health-system rank, K-12 school rank, gun and abortion law, the 2024 vote, and disaster risk. Every figure names its source and year, and each page ends with a plain verdict on which state is cheaper. The pairs people search most: Texas vs Florida, California vs Texas, Florida vs California, New York vs Florida, California vs Florida, Texas vs Colorado, Florida vs North Carolina, Texas vs Tennessee, Washington vs Oregon, California vs Nevada, Florida vs Georgia, Texas vs Arizona.

Most compared

How a comparison is computed

The verdict on each page is a tax bill, not an opinion. For both states we take a household earning the national median income, $74,580 a year (Census ACS 2022), owning that state's median home (Zillow 2024), and add up what it pays the state in a year: income tax at the effective rate the state's own brackets produce on that income, not the top rate; property tax at the state's effective rate on that home; and sales tax at the state's average combined rate on the household's spending. The state with the lower total is called cheaper, the page says by how much and which of the three taxes made the difference, and when the totals are within $250 of each other it says so instead of forcing a winner. Rates are for tax year 2026, last checked 2026-09-14.

The rest of the page sets the two states side by side on the cost of living index (100 is the national average), median home price, violent crime per 100,000 residents from the FBI, life expectancy and the Commonwealth Fund health-system rank, the Education Week K-12 rank, the Giffords gun-law grade, abortion access, the 2024 presidential margin and FEMA disaster risk, each with its source and year. Of the 1,225 possible pairs, 150 carry a written comparison today and are listed below by state; every other pair opens from a state's own profile page.