The taxes you can see are only the start.

These are the taxes with your name on them. Income tax, your property tax bill, sales tax at the register, the tax on gas. You can find every one of these on a bill or a receipt.

Where the whole reputation comes from. New Hampshire's individual income tax is genuinely zero — the Interest & Dividends tax was repealed effective 1 January 2025, so there is no longer a personal income tax of any kind. There is no general sales tax either. What replaces both is property tax, at about 1.58% of assessed value against Massachusetts's 1.09%. Note which gap is new: the I&D repeal is two years old, but New Hampshire has never taxed capital gains or wages, so those gaps are not a recent policy change.

Your employer pays a Social Security and Medicare tax on top of your pay. It never shows up on your paycheck. Almost every economist says it still comes out of your wages — your pay is lower because of it.

Employer FICA. Identical on both sides of the border. The first layer where moving buys you nothing.

Companies pay taxes too. They get that money back by charging you more and paying workers less. So part of a company tax is really your tax. Nobody agrees on how much, so you can move the sliders and see.

This is where the comparison gets interesting. Massachusetts levies a corporate excise on profits, which standard models push roughly 75% onto capital owners. New Hampshire levies two business taxes: a 7.5% Business Profits Tax that behaves like the Massachusetts excise, and a 0.55% Business Enterprise Tax whose base is compensation paid — that is, wages. A tax on payroll lands on labour almost directly, so New Hampshire's business tax burden falls harder on wage earners than its rate suggests. The federal corporate slice inside this layer is identical on both sides.

Part of your electric and gas bill is not for energy at all. It pays for state programs. It is set by an agency, not a vote, and it is never called a tax. In Massachusetts these charges on gas now cost more than the gas.

A real and under-discussed gap, and now taken from the filed tariffs rather than estimated. The inclusion rule: a charge counts if it exists because of a legislative or regulatory mandate, not because of the physical cost of generating and delivering energy. Electricity is a genuine like-for-like comparison — both figures are Eversource, the same company operating on both sides of the border. Massachusetts carries six mandated riders totalling 3.789¢/kWh; New Hampshire carries one, the System Benefits Charge, at 0.618¢. Read that as a statement about these two filed tariffs, not about either state as a whole: on the all-in retail price EIA puts New Hampshire only 1.49¢/kWh below Massachusetts, and that gap narrowed over the last year while this one did not. New Hampshire's tariff carries no recovery rider for net metering, SMART or EV programmes, and its stranded cost line is a credit. That absence from the bill is the finding — New Hampshire does require utilities to offer net metering, it simply does not recover a comparable cost through a separate rider.

Read the gap as conservative in both directions. The Massachusetts figure is a floor — its own tariff footnote puts 83C/83D offshore wind, solar programme and grid modernisation costs inside the Distribution charge, unbroken out, and RPS/CES sits inside supply. The New Hampshire gas figure is a ceiling — Liberty's LDAC bundles regulatory mechanisms that Massachusetts excludes. Both errors run the same way, so the true gap is wider than shown, not narrower. Gas is where it bites: 59.08¢/therm in Massachusetts against 16.30¢ in New Hampshire.

Government spent more than it collected. Somebody pays that back later, through higher taxes or fewer services. That somebody is probably you, or your kids.

Federal borrowing does not stop at the state line. A household with the same income owes the same share of it in Salem NH as in Salem MA — and the model now enforces that rather than asserting it. This layer is therefore identical on both sides of the border, which is a large part of why the advantage compresses at all.

State and local pension debt is deliberately excluded from both totals. Every other line on this page is something a household actually pays. An unfunded pension liability isn't billed to anyone — it's a claim on future tax capacity, and the part collected today already arrives through the taxes Layer 1 counts on each side. It is also the one item that cannot be sourced symmetrically across the border, so including it would tilt the comparison by construction. Both obligations are disclosed below instead.