Hawaii vs Maryland
A tax calculator says the difference is $4,211 a year. Once you count what a dollar actually buys in each, Hawaii is $883 ahead — $8,832 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 Maryland?
in what the money buys · $8,832 over 10 years
You need 1.5% 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: Hawaii and Maryland 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 Hawaii or Maryland
States that sit near Maryland on prices compared against Hawaii, and the mirror of that. The comparison you would run next.
- Hawaii vs Massachusetts— Massachusetts by $443
- Hawaii vs New Hampshire— New Hampshire by $2,709
- Connecticut vs Hawaii— level
- District of Columbia vs Maryland— District of Columbia by $119
- California vs Maryland— Maryland by $381
- Maryland vs New Jersey— Maryland by $3,966
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.
- Maui County, Hawaii— 0.17%, the cheapest
- Hawaii County, Hawaii— 0.29%, the dearest
- Talbot County, Maryland— 0.66%, the cheapest
- Baltimore city, Maryland— 1.48%, the dearest
Similar in price to Hawaii
States that sit next to Hawaii on the price index — often the comparison people should have run.
- California— 110.7 on prices
- District of Columbia— 109.9 on prices
- New Jersey— 108.8 on prices
- New York— 107.9 on prices
- Every Hawaii comparison— all 50
- Every Maryland comparison— all 50
- The nine states with no income tax— and what they charge instead
Hawaii leaves you $883 a year better off — not the number you were expecting
On $100,000 with a $400,000 home, the take-home difference between Hawaii and Maryland is $4,211 a year. That is what a tax calculator gives you, and it is a nominal figure: it treats a dollar in Hawaii and a dollar in Maryland as the same thing.
They are not. On the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index Hawaii is 110 and Maryland is 105, where 100 is the national average. Deflate each take-home by where it gets spent and what the money actually buys is $65,679 in Hawaii against $64,795 in Maryland — a real difference of $883 a year, 0.2× the nominal one, and $8,832 over the 10 years most people stay.
Where the two sit nationally: Hawaii is the 2nd most expensive place to live of the 51 — the 50 states and the District of Columbia — and Maryland is 8th. Housing, the component that moves most, is 125.3 against 121.1.
Grey columns are what a year of Hawaii and a year of Maryland 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 the largest gap between Hawaii and Maryland is in the one almost nobody models: local income tax, worth $2,989 a year here.
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 — $5,796 in Hawaii, $4,384 in Maryland. A difference of $1,412.
Property tax — $1,137 in Hawaii, $3,772 in Maryland on a $400,000 home, at each state's median local rate. This is bigger than the income tax difference, and it runs the other way — which is the whole reason the headline number disappoints.
Local income tax — $0 in Hawaii, $2,989 in Maryland. Maryland levies it in every one of its counties, so this is not optional and not a rounding error — it is the layer nearly every published comparison omits, and here it is worth $2,989 on its own. The figure above uses the median county; pick yours in the calculator and it moves.
Total: $27,753 in Hawaii against $31,965 in Maryland — 27.8% and 32.0% of gross.
And Hawaii housing costs 3.5% 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 Maryland than HawaiiDearer in Maryland than Hawaii
Each bar is how far apart Hawaii and Maryland 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 — 110 in Hawaii, 105 in Maryland. A gap of 5.0 points.
Housing — 125.3 against 121.1. A gap of 4.2 points, 0.8× the headline gap. This is what people mean when they say somewhere is expensive.
Goods — 111.6 against 102.5, 9.1 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 — 190.2 against 110.9. 79.3 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 Hawaii and Maryland is $1,675 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 $883. So renting is where the gap is widest here, by $792 — unusual, and it means buying erodes the advantage rather than compounding it.
The number to take into a salary negotiation: $101,486
This is the question people are actually asking and almost nobody answers: what would I need to earn in Maryland to live exactly as well as I do on $100,000 in Hawaii?
$101,486. That is 1.5% more than you earn now. Anything less than $101,486 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 Maryland. 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 × 105/110 — gives $95,455. The answer is $101,486, so the shortcut is $6,031 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 Maryland is $43,403, 8.5% above what you earn; on $250,000 it is $245,550, 1.8% below. The relationship bends by 10.3% across that range.
"Hawaii" and "Maryland" are not places you can compare
Every figure above uses each state's median local property tax rate — its counties in Hawaii, its counties in Maryland — and that is a simplification the page should own rather than hide.
Maryland has 24 counties, and the effective property tax rate runs from 0.66% in Talbot County to 1.48% in Baltimore city — 2.2 times. On a $400,000 home that is a spread of $3,268 a year, without leaving the state.
24 counties. Each dot is one. The spread is 2.2 times from end to end, which is why a state average is not a number you can plan with.
Hawaii has 4 counties, and the effective property tax rate runs from 0.17% in Maui County to 0.29% in Hawaii County — 1.7 times. On a $400,000 home that is a spread of $473 a year, without leaving the state.
So the honest version of this question is not "Hawaii or Maryland" but which county. Picking the cheapest county in Maryland against the dearest county in Hawaii swings the property tax line by $1,489 a year; the reverse choice swings it $5,231 the other way. Against a headline difference of $883, the county is not a detail — it is most of the decision.
Local income tax behaves the same way and is already in the figures above: $0 in Hawaii against $2,989 in Maryland at the median local rate. Choose your county and that line moves too — it is the layer with the widest spread inside a single state.
Over 10 years: $8,832
Nobody moves for one year, and almost no comparison prices the decision over the horizon on which it is actually made.
At $883 a year of real difference, 10 years in Hawaii instead of Maryland is worth $8,832 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 $883 a year it takes 17.0 years to recover — so the annual figure only becomes yours from year 18.
At three horizons: $2,650 over three years, $8,832 over 10, $26,497 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 Hawaii and Maryland. That is what the $101,486 break-even above is for — it prices an offer instead of assuming the offer is identical.
The layer almost every comparison leaves out: $2,989 of local income tax
Eleven states let counties, cities or school districts levy their own income tax on top of the state one. Maryland is one of them, and it changes this comparison by $2,989 a year on $100,000.
$0 in Hawaii against $2,989 in Maryland, at the median local rate. For scale, the state income tax difference between these two is $1,412 — so this "minor" layer is larger than the state difference everybody quotes.
It gets omitted because it is genuinely hard to assemble: the rates live in state comptroller files, municipal registers and school district schedules rather than in one table. We loaded them — Maryland's 24 counties, Indiana's 92, Ohio's municipalities and school districts, Pennsylvania's earned income taxes, Michigan's 24 cities, New York City's own brackets — which is why the figure above is a figure and not a caveat.
It is also the layer most sensitive to where exactly you land. Choose your county in the calculator and this line moves more than any other.
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 Hawaii or Maryland?
- Hawaii, by $883 a year in real purchasing power on $100,000 with a $400,000 home. The take-home difference is only $4,211; the rest comes from the cost of living, where Hawaii indexes at 110 and Maryland at 105 against a national average of 100.
- How much do I need to earn in Maryland to match $100,000 in Hawaii?
- $101,486 — 1.5% more. That accounts for federal tax, FICA, state tax, property tax and the price level in each state.
- What are the taxes in Hawaii vs Maryland?
- On $100,000: state income tax of $5,796 in Hawaii against $4,384 in Maryland, and property tax of $1,137 against $3,772 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 Maryland really have lower property tax?
- That depends entirely on the county, which is why a state-level answer is not much use. Maryland runs from 0.66% in Talbot County to 1.48% in Baltimore city — 2.2 times, or $3,268 a year on a $400,000 home. The median is 0.94%.
- How much is the difference over 10 years?
- $8,832 in today's purchasing power, at $883 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.