How NEW YORK Taxes Retirees

In New York, if the bulk of your income comes from Social Security, pensions and IRA(401k etc.) distributions, your income tax will not be huge.  New York does not tax Social Security or public pensions, to include military pensions.  And they have a $20k exemption on qualified plan distributions as well. You only have to be 59.5 to qualify for these exemptions too, which is nice.   So, it's not hard to see a couple with gross income of say $80k not paying much in income tax to the state of New York.   However, it's the sales and property tax that get you.  Sales tax looks small when you just look at the state sales tax.  It's only 4%, which puts NY in the bottom ten of all states for sales tax.  That's not the full picture though.  Add in localities and you're more than double the state rate, up to almost 9%.  That nearly 9% rate puts New York in the top 10 highest sales tax states in the country. Property taxes are a major hurdle too.  The 1.40% puts them in the top 15 most heavily taxes state.  However, because property values are higher than average, when actual dollars are paid, New York is the 4th highest ranking state in terms of property tax.  There are a couple exemptions some could qualify that are decent actually. However, these exemptions are income based and your income needs to be quite low to qualify for the first exemption.   The second, as long as your income is less than $90k or so, you'll have a decent chance of getting an exemption on some of your property tax.  Still, even with these exemptions, the property tax is a monster. Not two ways around it.