Keeping with tradition, let’s look at the results from the Tax Foundation’s annual Tax Competitiveness Index (as I did in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, etc, etc).

Here’s a map showing how states are ranked. It’s good to be light green and it’s bad to be dark blue.

It would have been nice if the Tax Foundation’s map identified and numbered the states to make it easy to identify the best and worst.

Though the report obviously has all that information. Readers who are familiar with state tax issues won’t be overly surprised to see Top-5 and Bottom-5 jurisdictions.

The report is based on several variables, such as business taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.

A good rule of thumb, however, is that a state will score highly if it does not have an income tax (which is the case for the Top-5 jurisdictions).

Likewise, a class-warfare based tax system is a good way of ranking near the bottom.

In addition to knowing which states are the best and worst, I also think it’s important to know which states are improving and deteriorating over time.

So I dug into the Tax Foundation’s archives and identified the states that have enjoyed the biggest jumps as well as the ones that suffered the biggest declines since 2011.

As you can see, the state of Washington is a train wreck, as are Illinois and Oregon. Kudos to North Carolina for a huge jump, and special mention for Iowa and North Dakota.

Keep in mind that some states have always been good (like Florida and South Dakota) and some have always been bad (such as New York and California), so they would not show up in a table measuring relative changes.

P.S. One final comment is that I don’t think Wyoming deserves to be highly ranked. It has a bloated state budget, but most of that spending is financed by energy severance taxes, which are not counted in the rankings. I think Alaska is over-ranked for the same reason.