Maryland vs Montana
A tax calculator says the difference is $4,021 a year. Once you count what a dollar actually buys in each, Montana is $11,374 ahead — $113,742 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 Montana?
in what the money buys · $113,742 over 10 years
A pay cut of up to $16,631 (16.6%) still leaves you level.
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: Maryland and Montana 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 Maryland or Montana
States that sit near Montana on prices compared against Maryland, and the mirror of that. The comparison you would run next.
- Maryland vs North Carolina— North Carolina by $12,567
- Maryland vs Wisconsin— Wisconsin by $9,041
- Maryland vs South Carolina— South Carolina by $13,391
- Massachusetts vs Montana— Montana by $10,048
- Montana vs New Hampshire— Montana by $7,782
- Connecticut vs Montana— Montana by $10,478
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.
- Talbot County, Maryland— 0.66%, the cheapest
- Baltimore city, Maryland— 1.48%, the dearest
- Madison County, Montana— 0.41%, the cheapest
- Blaine County, Montana— 1.52%, the dearest
Similar in price to Maryland
States that sit next to Maryland on the price index — often the comparison people should have run.
- New York— 107.9 on prices
- Washington— 107 on prices
- Massachusetts— 105.8 on prices
- New Hampshire— 104.2 on prices
- Every Maryland comparison— all 50
- Every Montana comparison— all 50
- The nine states with no income tax— and what they charge instead
Maryland or Montana is a housing decision: Maryland housing runs 43.1% dearer
The tax difference between Maryland and Montana is real but it is not what decides this one. On $100,000 with a $400,000 home, take-home moves by $4,021 a year. Housing moves by far more: the housing component of the official price index is 121.1 in Maryland against 84.6 in Montana, a gap of 36.5 points against just 10.4 on the index as a whole.
Which means a single blended cost-of-living number would hide the only variable that matters here. Put the housing gap into the arithmetic and Montana comes out $11,374 a year ahead in what the money buys — $113,742 over 10 years. If you rent a small flat, most of that advantage never reaches you; if you buy a family house, it is understated.
Where the two sit nationally: Maryland is the 8th most expensive place to live of the 51 — the 50 states and the District of Columbia — and Montana is 30th. Housing, the component that moves most, is 121.1 against 84.6.
Grey columns are what a year of Maryland and a year of Montana 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 $7,544 against $2,989 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 — $4,384 in Maryland, $4,289 in Montana. A difference of $95.
Property tax — $3,772 in Maryland, $2,834 in Montana 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 — $2,989 in Maryland, $0 in Montana. 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: $31,965 in Maryland against $27,944 in Montana — 32.0% and 27.9% of gross.
And Maryland housing costs 43.1% more
The cost of living gap between Maryland and Montana is almost entirely a housing gap, and that is only visible because the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parity publishes its components separately rather than as one blended number. 100 is the national average.
Cheaper in Montana than MarylandDearer in Montana than Maryland
Each bar is how far apart Maryland and Montana 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 — 105 in Maryland, 94.6 in Montana. A gap of 10.4 points.
Housing — 121.1 against 84.6. A gap of 36.5 points, 3.5× the headline gap. This is what people mean when they say somewhere is expensive.
Goods — 102.5 against 96, 6.5 points apart — 5.6 times narrower than the housing gap — and typical: across all 1,275 pairs the median is 2.7 points for goods against 24.9 for housing. Blended into one figure, what you are reading is mostly housing wearing a general label.
Utilities — 110.9 against 72.3. 38.6 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 Maryland and Montana is $10,778 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 $11,374. So buying widens the gap by $596: the more house you own, the more this comparison is worth to you.
The number to take into a salary negotiation: $83,369
This is the question people are actually asking and almost nobody answers: what would I need to earn in Montana to live exactly as well as I do on $100,000 in Maryland?
$83,369. That is 16.6% less than you earn now. You could take a pay cut of $16,631 moving to Montana and be no worse off — which is a very different conversation to have with a recruiter than "Montana has lower taxes".
The dashed line is the salary you earn now. The solid line is what matches it in Montana. 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 × 94.6/105 — gives $90,095. The answer is $83,369, so the shortcut is $6,726 too high: 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 Montana is $33,146, 17.1% below what you earn; on $250,000 it is $210,735, 15.7% below. The relationship bends by 1.4% across that range.
"Maryland" and "Montana" are not places you can compare
Every figure above uses each state's median local property tax rate — its counties in Maryland, its counties in Montana — and that is a simplification the page should own rather than hide.
Montana has 56 counties, and the effective property tax rate runs from 0.41% in Madison County to 1.52% in Blaine County — 3.7 times. On a $400,000 home that is a spread of $4,454 a year, without leaving the state.
56 counties. Each dot is one. The spread is 3.7 times from end to end, which is why a state average is not a number you can plan with.
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.
So the honest version of this question is not "Maryland or Montana" but which county. Picking the cheapest county in Montana against the dearest county in Maryland swings the property tax line by $4,268 a year; the reverse choice swings it $3,454 the other way. Against a headline difference of $11,374, 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: $2,989 in Maryland against $0 in Montana 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: $113,742
Nobody moves for one year, and almost no comparison prices the decision over the horizon on which it is actually made.
At $11,374 a year of real difference, 10 years in Montana instead of Maryland is worth $113,742 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 takes until year 2 for the move to pay for itself. That is the figure a per-year comparison hides.
The first slice of it is not yours, though. Reckoning $15,000 for removal, fees and selling costs — this page's assumption, not a sourced figure — at $11,374 a year it takes 1.3 years to earn back, so a stay shorter than that loses money on a move the annual figure calls a win.
At three horizons: $34,123 over three years, $113,742 over 10, $341,227 over thirty.
None of those figures contains the one variable that could overturn them: the same job rarely pays the same in Maryland and Montana. That is what the $83,369 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.
$2,989 in Maryland against $0 in Montana, at the median local rate. For scale, the state income tax difference between these two is $95 — 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.
You could take a $16,631 pay cut to move to Montana and be no worse off
That is the version of this comparison worth taking into a negotiation, and it is not a figure any tax calculator produces.
Matching your $100,000 standard of living in Maryland takes $83,369 in Montana — 16.6% less than you earn now. So an offer of $83,369 is not a downgrade, and an offer above it is a raise however it looks on paper.
The reverse framing is the one recruiters use, and it is worth being able to answer: a company in Maryland offering to match your current salary is offering you less than the Montana job at $83,369. On 10 years the difference is $113,742.
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 Maryland or Montana?
- Montana, by $11,374 a year in real purchasing power on $100,000 with a $400,000 home. The take-home difference is only $4,021; the rest comes from the cost of living, where Maryland indexes at 105 and Montana at 94.6 against a national average of 100.
- How much do I need to earn in Montana to match $100,000 in Maryland?
- $83,369 — 16.6% less than you earn now, so a pay cut of up to $16,631 still leaves you level. That accounts for federal tax, FICA, state tax, property tax and the price level in each state.
- What are the taxes in Maryland vs Montana?
- On $100,000: state income tax of $4,384 in Maryland against $4,289 in Montana, and property tax of $3,772 against $2,834 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 Montana really have lower property tax?
- That depends entirely on the county, which is why a state-level answer is not much use. Montana runs from 0.41% in Madison County to 1.52% in Blaine County — 3.7 times, or $4,454 a year on a $400,000 home. The median is 0.71%.
- How much is the difference over 10 years?
- $113,742 in today's purchasing power, at $11,374 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.