The Local Tax Your Paycheck Calculator Might Be Missing

Who actually charges a local income tax

Most of the country has no city or county income tax at all — your paycheck calculator's federal-plus-state number is the real number. But a real minority of places layer a local tax on top, and the mechanics differ enough by state that "does my city have one" isn't a single yes/no question:

This isn't an exhaustive list — Detroit, several other Michigan cities, Maryland's county piggyback tax, and a handful of Delaware, Indiana and Missouri jurisdictions also levy one. If your city or county isn't above, check its finance department directly before assuming there's nothing to add.

New York: NYC and Yonkers, worked example

New York City's own resident income tax is graduated, separate from the state tax QuantCurb's calculator already models, and it stacks on top of it. For a single filer, the 2026 city bracket schedule is:

Take a single NYC resident with $85,000 of city taxable income (simplifying by using the same taxable-income figure the calculator already produces for state tax, rather than re-deriving NYC's own adjustments). Running that through the bracket table above — the same slice-by-slice method a federal or state bracket uses — comes to:

That's about $264 a month — an effective NYC rate of roughly 3.73% on the $85,000 — that a federal-plus-state-only calculator has no way of showing, because it isn't federal or state tax at all. Commuters who live outside the five boroughs and work in NYC do not owe this tax; it applies to residents only, which is the opposite of how Philadelphia's version works (next section).

Yonkers residents face a different structure entirely: rather than its own bracket table, Yonkers charges a 16.75% surcharge on whatever New York State tax you already owe — so it scales with your state tax bill, not your income directly. Nonresidents who merely work in Yonkers pay a much smaller, flat 0.5% Nonresident Earnings Tax on wages earned there (NY Form Y-203) instead of the resident surcharge.

Philadelphia's Wage Tax — residents owe it everywhere, nonresidents owe it where they work

Philadelphia's Wage Tax is a flat percentage of wages, but the two rates below apply on different tests, not the same one. Residents owe the resident rate on all their wages no matter where they physically work — a Philadelphia resident who commutes to a New Jersey office, or works fully remote for an out-of-state employer, still owes the full resident rate. Nonresidents owe the lower rate only on wages from work physically performed inside city limits — a suburban commuter who works in the city owes it; the same commuter working from home on a given day generally doesn't, for that day's wages. As of 2026 the city is partway through a scheduled five-year reduction, so the rate itself steps down mid-year:

On a $60,000 salary, the gap is small in percentage terms but real in dollars: a Philadelphia resident owes about $2,244/year (3.74%) in Wage Tax on the full amount regardless of where they work, while a nonresident commuter living in the New Jersey or Pennsylvania suburbs who physically works in the city owes about $2,058/year (3.43%) on that in-city work — a common surprise for people who assume a city tax can't apply to them because they don't live there. Both figures are on top of Pennsylvania's flat 3.07% state tax and federal tax, and neither shows up in a calculator that only asks for state of residence.

Ohio's three-system mess: RITA, CCA, and self-administered cities

Ohio doesn't run one statewide local-tax system — each municipality with an income tax picks how it gets collected, and the three arrangements behave differently enough that "Ohio has RITA tax" is an oversimplification: RITA (the Regional Income Tax Agency) collects for roughly 330, mostly small-to-midsize cities and villages; CCA (the Central Collection Agency) collects for Cleveland and a separate set of communities; and several of Ohio's largest cities — Columbus, Akron and Cincinnati among them — administer their own tax directly rather than using either agency. Rates commonly run 1%–2.5% depending on the specific city.

The withholding mechanics add a second layer on top of just "what's the rate": your employer withholds a workplace tax for the municipality where you physically work, regardless of where you live. If your home municipality also taxes income, it may separately require a residence tax filing — but most give a credit for tax already paid to your workplace municipality, and that credit rate is set by each city's own ordinance, ranging from a full 100% credit down to 0%. Two people living in the same Ohio suburb but working in different cities can end up with genuinely different total local tax bills once their home city's specific credit rule is applied. There's no way to give one number here that's right for every combination — check your specific work and home municipalities (RITA, CCA, or the city's own site) rather than assuming a flat rate applies.

Denver's flat-fee OPT, and Kentucky's county-by-county occupational tax

Denver charges an Occupational Privilege Tax that isn't a percentage at all — it's a flat $5.75 per month withheld from any employee earning at least $500 in a calendar month for work performed in the city, plus a separate $4/month paid by the employer (not deducted from your pay). At $69/year, it barely moves the needle on take-home pay, but it's still an omission if a calculator claims to show your exact Denver paycheck. One thing worth flagging for anyone using an older source: Aurora, Colorado repealed its own OPT effective January 1, 2025 — if a guide or calculator still lists an Aurora occupational tax for 2026, that's stale information, not a live cost.

Kentucky runs local tax entirely differently again: there's no state involvement at all — each county sets its own occupational license fee on payroll earned within it, and 87 of Kentucky's 120 counties currently levy one, at rates from 0.5% to 2.5% (median around 1%). Cities can layer their own fee on top of the county's, and — like Ohio's workplace/residence split above — the combined rate often depends on residency, not just location. Louisville/Jefferson County is a good example: the commonly-quoted 2.2% rate (a 1.25% city/county operations fee, a 0.75% school board levy, and a 0.20% transit fee) applies to residents; the school board component is resident-only, so someone who works in Louisville Metro but lives elsewhere pays just 1.45%. Lexington/Fayette County runs a single combined 2.25% rate that doesn't carry the same resident/nonresident split. This is separate from — and stacks on top of — Kentucky's own state income tax, a flat rate that is itself scheduled to keep declining (3.5% as of January 1, 2026, down from 4.0% the year before).

How to adjust the calculator's output by hand

With that caveat in mind, the local-tax layer itself is a three-step manual adjustment, not a guess:

The Methodology page's own limitations section already discloses that our tools "cannot account for... municipal tax variations" — this piece is the concrete version of that disclosure for the specific places where it actually matters.

FAQ: local income tax and paycheck calculators