Alaska vs Georgia
A tax calculator says the difference is $5,086 a year. Once you count what a dollar actually buys in each, Alaska is $561 ahead — $5,611 over 10 years.
Property tax is set by counties, not states. Inside Texas alone the rate varies six times over, so this is the single choice that changes the answer most.
Does it work everywhere in Georgia?
in what the money buys · $5,611 over 10 years
You need 0.8% more for the move to break even.
Who worked this out, and what it is built on
I build and maintain every comparison on this site — 1275 state pairs so far, on the same engine that runs the tax calculators for all 50 states and 3,143 counties. This is not a template with two names swapped into it: Alaska and Georgia are run through the actual rules of each place, and if the numbers say the move is not worth it, that is what the page says.
Four sources, and one deliberate refusal. Federal figures from the IRS revenue procedure. State rates read one state at a time off each state’s own department of revenue. County property tax from the US Census Bureau. Cost of living from the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities, 2024 — and not from Numbeo or any other crowd-sourced index, because those are filled in by users, publish no methodology, and cannot be cited. That single choice is most of why the cost-of-living numbers here differ from everybody else’s.
When I get something wrong I publish the correction with the date and what it cost — including the two mistakes on these pages I found myself. Data last verified September 1, 2026.
Where to go from here
Almost nobody is choosing between exactly two places. These are the questions that usually come next, with the answer already attached so you can see which is worth opening.
Other moves involving Alaska or Georgia
States that sit near Georgia on prices compared against Alaska, and the mirror of that. The comparison you would run next.
- Alaska vs Michigan— Alaska by $1,087
- Alaska vs Maine— Alaska by $3,348
- Alaska vs Idaho— Idaho by $1,620
- Georgia vs Rhode Island— Georgia by $5,016
- Colorado vs Georgia— Georgia by $2,242
- Florida vs Georgia— Georgia by $239
Each state on its own
The full detail behind each half of the comparison above.
The counties that decide it
Property tax is set by county, and the spread inside one state beats most state pairs.
- Copper River Census Area, Alaska— 0.08%, the cheapest
- Dillingham Census Area, Alaska— 1.76%, the dearest
- Fannin County, Georgia— 0.35%, the cheapest
- Stewart County, Georgia— 1.71%, the dearest
Similar in price to Alaska
States that sit next to Alaska on the price index — often the comparison people should have run.
- Florida— 103.4 on prices
- Oregon— 103.4 on prices
- Colorado— 103.1 on prices
- Rhode Island— 102.3 on prices
- Every Alaska comparison— all 50
- Every Georgia comparison— all 50
- The nine states with no income tax— and what they charge instead
Alaska leaves you $561 a year better off — not the number you were expecting
On $100,000 with a $400,000 home, the take-home difference between Alaska and Georgia is $5,086 a year. That is what a tax calculator gives you, and it is a nominal figure: it treats a dollar in Alaska and a dollar in Georgia as the same thing.
They are not. On the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index Alaska is 102.4 and Georgia is 96.3, where 100 is the national average. Deflate each take-home by where it gets spent and what the money actually buys is $74,525 in Alaska against $73,964 in Georgia — a real difference of $561 a year, 0.1× the nominal one, and $5,611 over the 10 years most people stay.
Where the two sit nationally: Alaska is the 14th most expensive place to live of the 51 — the 50 states and the District of Columbia — and Georgia is 27th. Housing, the component that moves most, is 93.8 against 88.7.
Grey columns are what a year of Alaska and a year of Georgia are worth in the same money. The bars between them are each thing that changes, in the order it changes: green adds, amber takes away.
Where the money actually goes, line by line
Five separate taxes, and here they matter but they do not win: the price level shifts the answer by $4,406 against $4,391 for the biggest tax gap. Both are in play, which makes this one of the pairs where the layers are worth reading closely:
Federal income tax — $13,170 either way. Identical, because it is federal. Any comparison that shows a difference here is wrong.
FICA — $7,650 either way. Also federal, also identical.
State income tax — $0 in Alaska, $4,391 in Georgia. Alaska does not levy one at all, which is the fact that sells the move — and, as the next line shows, not the fact that decides it.
Property tax — $2,866 in Alaska, $3,561 in Georgia on a $400,000 home, at each state's median local rate. Smaller than the income tax gap here, which is not usually the case.
Local income tax — zero on both sides. Alaska has none at any level, state or local — and that holds for all nine states without a state income tax, none of which lets a county or city levy one either. The two go together.
Total: $23,686 in Alaska against $28,772 in Georgia — 23.7% and 28.8% of gross.
And Alaska housing costs 5.7% more
Comparison sites use a single crowd-sourced cost-of-living figure. This is the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parity, official and broken into components — and on this pair the components tell a stranger story than the headline, starting with utilities.
Cheaper in Georgia than AlaskaDearer in Georgia than Alaska
Each bar is how far apart Alaska and Georgia are on that component, and which way. Housing almost always runs several times wider than everything else — which is why a single blended index tells you very little.
All items — 102.4 in Alaska, 96.3 in Georgia. A gap of 6.1 points.
Housing — 93.8 against 88.7. A gap of 5.1 points, 0.8× the headline gap. This is what people mean when they say somewhere is expensive.
Goods — 106.3 against 98.9, 7.4 points apart — wide for goods: across all 1,275 state pairs the median goods gap is 2.7 points against 24.9 for housing, so on this pair the shopping basket genuinely differs and not just the rent.
Utilities — 119 against 92.8. 26.2 points, the second widest component after housing on this pair, and large enough to matter to anyone heating or cooling a big house.
Which half of this reaches you depends on whether you buy. Renting, the real difference between Alaska and Georgia is $338 a year — property tax comes out of your side entirely, and what is left is the price level. Buying a $400,000 home it is $561. So buying widens the gap by $223: the more house you own, the more this comparison is worth to you.
The number to take into a salary negotiation: $100,827
This is the question people are actually asking and almost nobody answers: what would I need to earn in Georgia to live exactly as well as I do on $100,000 in Alaska?
$100,827. That is 0.8% more than you earn now. Anything less than $100,827 and the move costs you money however it is presented.
The dashed line is the salary you earn now. The solid line is what matches it in Georgia. If the relationship were a simple multiplier the two would be parallel — they are not, because brackets, the Social Security ceiling and a property tax that does not move with income all bend it.
The obvious shortcut fails here, and by a measurable amount. Scaling your salary by the ratio of price levels — $100,000 × 96.3/102.4 — gives $94,043. The answer is $100,827, so the shortcut is $6,784 too low: brackets, the Social Security ceiling and a property tax that ignores income all bend the line the shortcut assumes is straight.
The figure belongs to the two states and your income. On $40,000 the match in Georgia is $40,290, 0.7% above what you earn; on $250,000 it is $253,017, 1.2% above. The relationship bends by 0.5% across that range.
Over 10 years: $5,611
At $561 a year, 10 years in Alaska comes to $5,611 — and the county choice inside Alaska is worth $66,980 over the same period. Both are real; only one of them is in the headline.
At $561 a year of real difference, 10 years in Alaska instead of Georgia is worth $5,611 in today's purchasing power — before compounding anything you might invest it in.
The line starts below zero because moving costs about $15,000 and lands entirely in year one. It pays for itself inside the first year. That is the figure a per-year comparison hides.
And it is slower to arrive than the annual figure suggests. Reckoning $15,000 for removal, fees and the cost of selling — an assumption this page makes, not a figure from a source — at $561 a year it takes 26.7 years to recover — so the annual figure only becomes yours from year 28.
At three horizons: $1,683 over three years, $5,611 over 10, $16,833 over thirty — and the three-year figure does not clear the cost of getting there.
None of those figures contains the one variable that could overturn them: the same job rarely pays the same in Alaska and Georgia. That is what the $100,827 break-even above is for — it prices an offer instead of assuming the offer is identical.
Choosing the county matters more than choosing the state here
This comparison is worth $561 a year. Choosing where inside Alaska to live is worth $6,698 a year on the same $400,000 home — 11.9 times as much.
Alaska has 26 boroughs and census areas and the effective property tax rate runs from 0.08% in Copper River Census Area to 1.76% in Dillingham Census Area. Move to the wrong borough or census area in the better state and you have given back more than the move gained you, twice over.
Which reframes the question. Rather than "Alaska or Georgia", the decision that carries the money is which borough or census area inside Alaska — and the answer is not visible on any comparison that stops at the state line. Set both in the calculator above and every figure on this page recomputes on your actual rates rather than two medians.
The same logic applies to the losing side: Georgia has counties cheaper than the median used here too, and for a reader who is staying put, moving county at home may be the better version of this decision.
Where every number here comes from
Four sources, each read off the body that publishes it:
US Bureau of Economic Analysis — Regional Price Parities by State and Metro Area, 2024 (released 19 February 2026) — read 2026-09-08. https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area
IRS — Revenue Procedure for the tax year (federal brackets, standard deduction and FICA) — read 2026-09-02. https://www.irs.gov/
Each state's own department of revenue (state income tax rates and deductions), verified one state at a time — read 2026-09-02. https://estimatetax.net/sources/
US Census Bureau, American Community Survey (county effective property tax rates) — read 2026-08-31. https://data.census.gov/
The cost of living index is the part worth checking, because it is where comparison sites usually reach for something crowd-sourced. The Regional Price Parities are produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, cover every state and metro area, and are published with a methodology document. The figures here are the 2024 release and are not extrapolated forward.
And what this page does not model:
— The cost of living index is the BEA's Regional Price Parity for 2024, the most recent published. It is not extrapolated to the current year, and it is a state-wide average — inside a state, a metro area and a rural county differ by more than most state pairs do.
— Moving costs, state transfer taxes on buying a home, and the cost of selling the one you have are not included. On a short stay they can outweigh every annual difference on this page.
— Sales tax is not modelled. It is inside the BEA index — that is what a price parity measures — but it is not broken out separately here.
— The comparison assumes the same salary in both places unless you change it. In practice a job in a high-cost state usually pays more, which is exactly what the break-even figure is for.
— Health insurance, childcare and car insurance vary enormously by state and are only inside the index as averages. If any of the three is a large part of your budget, it deserves its own arithmetic.
Where to go next
Questions
- Is it cheaper to live in Alaska or Georgia?
- Alaska, by $561 a year in real purchasing power on $100,000 with a $400,000 home. The take-home difference is only $5,086; the rest comes from the cost of living, where Alaska indexes at 102.4 and Georgia at 96.3 against a national average of 100.
- How much do I need to earn in Georgia to match $100,000 in Alaska?
- $100,827 — 0.8% more. That accounts for federal tax, FICA, state tax, property tax and the price level in each state.
- What are the taxes in Alaska vs Georgia?
- On $100,000: state income tax of $0 in Alaska against $4,391 in Georgia, and property tax of $2,866 against $3,561 on a $400,000 home at median county rates. Federal tax and FICA are identical in both — $13,170 and $7,650 — so any comparison showing a difference there is wrong.
- Does Georgia really have lower property tax?
- That depends entirely on the county, which is why a state-level answer is not much use. Georgia runs from 0.35% in Fannin County to 1.71% in Stewart County — 4.9 times, or $5,448 a year on a $400,000 home. The median is 0.89%.
- How much is the difference over 10 years?
- $5,611 in today's purchasing power, at $561 a year. That excludes moving and housing transaction costs, which land in year one and can outweigh everything else on a short stay.
- Where does your cost of living data come from?
- The Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024, an official index covering every state and metro area with a published methodology. Not a crowd-sourced database — and it comes broken into housing, goods, utilities and services, which matters because housing moves several times more than anything else.