PROVIDENCE – With Tax Day around the corner, WalletHub looked at which states tax their residents most aggressively, and found that Rhode Island ranks eighth highest in the nation for its tax burden.
States were compared based on three components of tax burden – property taxes, individual income taxes, and sales and excise taxes – as a share of personal income.
“Not to be confused with tax rates, which vary widely based on an individual’s particular circumstances, tax burden measures the exact proportion of total personal income that residents pay toward state and local taxes,” the financial services website said.
Based on that methodology, Rhode Island ranked eighth highest for its overall tax burden of 10.09 percent and fifth highest for its property tax burden of 4.8 percent. It fared better in categories of individual income tax burden, coming in 30th at 2.15 percent, and total sales and excise tax burden, coming in 32nd at 3.14 percent.
New York ranked highest on the list for an overall tax burden of 12.94 percent, followed by Hawaii (11.27 percent), Vermont (10.75 percent), Maine (10.73 percent) , Minnesota (10.24 percent) and Connecticut (10.23 percent).
Massachusetts was 18th on the list for a tax burden of 9.01 percent, and New Hampshire ranked the lowest among the New England states at 46th for its 6.7 percent overall tax burden.
Delaware ranked 50th for having the lowest overall tax burden in the nation at 5.59 percent.
WalletHub said it used data from the Tax Policy Center to create the ranking.