Maine vs every state

The best move out of Maine is Louisiana, worth $13,710 a year

This page resolves all 50 comparisons out of Maine at once, on the same salary and the same house, so they can be ranked against each other rather than read one at a time.

On $100,000 with a $400,000 home: 34 of the 50 leave you better off, 16 leave you worse off. Better off means purchasing power — take-home divided by what things cost there — not take-home on its own.

The extremes are further apart than most people expect. Louisiana is worth $13,710 a year more than staying; New York costs $10,399 a year. That is a spread of $24,109 between the best and worst destination from the same starting point.

Every figure in the table below is computed, not estimated, and each row links to the full page for that pair.

In 10 of the 50, the tax figure points the wrong way

This is the number that decides whether this whole comparison is worth reading, so it is published rather than claimed.

For each destination there are two answers. One is what a tax calculator says: your take-home goes up, or down. The other is what happens after dividing by what things cost there. In 10 of the 50 moves out of Maine, those two answers name different states.

Which means a reader following the take-home figure would move in the wrong direction 10 times out of 50. The cases: Kansas (take-home down $828, purchasing power up $4,532); Washington (take-home up $6,993, purchasing power down $117); Virginia (take-home up $2,695, purchasing power down $221); Minnesota (take-home up $886, purchasing power down $257); Rhode Island (take-home up $1,492, purchasing power down $2,229); New Hampshire (take-home up $2,218, purchasing power down $2,790), and 4 more in the table below.

Maine sits at 97 on the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index, 26th most expensive of 51, with housing at 78.9. The further a state is from the national 100, the more often the two answers come apart — which is exactly why a single blended "cost of living" number cannot carry a decision.

All 50 comparisons from Maine, resolved

Ranked by what the move is worth in purchasing power. Real is the annual difference after tax and prices; take-home is what a tax calculator would show you; break-even is what you would need to earn there to live exactly as you do on $100,000 here.

A blank break-even means no salary in that state matches Maine on these numbers — the price difference outruns anything the tax difference can recover.

The states where your life would cost about the same

Buried in the table above is the answer to a question people rarely think to ask: which states are financially interchangeable with Maine? Not cheaper, not dearer — the same, once tax and prices are both counted. Those are the moves you can make for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

The five closest on $100,000: Washington (−$117 a year), Virginia (−$221 a year), Minnesota (−$257 a year), Colorado (+$544 a year), Delaware (+$1,056 a year). Compare that with what a tax calculator would say about the same five: Washington +$6,993, Virginia +$2,695, Minnesota +$886, Colorado +$4,903, Delaware +$3,047. Several of those look like real differences on take-home and vanish once prices are counted, which is the same effect running the other way.

And the opposite end, for context on how wide this gets: New York would cost you $10,399 a year and Louisiana would gain you $13,710. The same salary, the same house, a difference of $24,109 depending only on which state line you are inside.

Where Maine itself sits nationally, on the three layers that decide these pages: 26th of 51 on price level (97, national average 100), 3rd on state income tax on $100,000, and 15th on property tax at its median local rate. A state can be near the top on one and near the bottom on another — that mismatch is exactly what produces the 10 contradictions above.

Before comparing Maine to anywhere, compare it to itself

Every figure above uses the median county property tax rate in Maine, and that is a simplification this page should own rather than bury.

Maine has 16 counties, and the effective property tax rate runs from 0.88% in Hancock County to 1.26% in Penobscot County — 1.4 times. On a $400,000 home that is a spread of $1,513 a year, without leaving the state.

Compare that against the table above: 6 of the 50 destinations are worth less than moving county inside Maine. For those, the state line is the wrong thing to be looking at.

The median rate used here is 1.12%. Pick your actual county on any pair page and every number on it moves.

Maine does levy a state income tax, which is the figure most comparisons stop at. It is one of five layers here, and frequently not the one that decides the answer.

Which of these people actually search for

A note on why all 50 exist rather than only the popular ones, because the honest version of this is more interesting than the marketing version.

Search volume was measured for every pair with the Google Ads API, on the seven phrasings that carry relocation intent — "cost of living X vs Y", "taxes in X vs Y", "moving from X to Y" and their variants. Bare "X vs Y" was excluded deliberately: it is enormous and it is college football. "Alabama vs Oklahoma" alone returns 673,000 a month, and none of it is people choosing where to live.

Out of Maine, none of the 50 pairs returned volume above the tool's reporting threshold. That is not evidence nobody asks; it is the point at which a keyword tool stops counting.

They all exist because the marginal cost of a comparison here is not writing it — the engine already knows how to compute both sides. So the page exists or it does not on a decision about inventory, and the thing that would make it wrong is if the pages said the same thing as each other. They do not: even the direction of the answer flips on 10 of these 50.

Where every number on this page 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 2024 Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis — an official index with a published methodology, not a crowd-sourced database. That single choice is most of why the cost of living figures here differ from everybody else's.

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.

Questions

Where is the best place to move from Maine?

Louisiana, by $13,710 a year in purchasing power on $100,000 with a $400,000 home. 34 of the 50 states leave you better off; the worst destination, New York, costs $10,399 a year.

Is it cheaper to live in Maine or somewhere else?

Both, depending where. 34 of 50 states work out cheaper in real terms and 16 work out dearer. The table on this page resolves all of them on the same salary so they can be compared against each other rather than one at a time.

Does moving somewhere with lower taxes actually leave me better off?

Not always, and from Maine it fails 10 times out of 50. In those cases the state with the better take-home leaves you able to buy less, once you divide by what things cost there. That is a statement about what money buys, not about which state is a nicer place to be — for example Kansas, where take-home goes down $828 but purchasing power goes up $4,532.

How much would I need to earn to move from Maine?

It depends entirely on the destination, and each pair page solves it exactly. On $100,000 here, the cheapest match is South Dakota at $83,216 and the dearest is New Jersey at $117,597.

Does the county matter more than the state?

Often, yes. Inside Maine the effective property tax rate runs 1.4 times from Hancock County to Penobscot County — $1,513 a year on a $400,000 home, without crossing a state line. 6 of the 50 destinations are worth less than that.

Why do you have a page for every pair of states?

Because the engine computes both sides either way, so the cost of a comparison is inventory rather than writing — and because the pages genuinely differ. The winner, the amount, the break-even salary and the county spread change on every one, and from Maine even the direction of the answer flips on 10 of 50. A test measures that rather than assuming it.