In the United States, the jock tax is the colloquially named income tax levied against visitors to a city or state who earn money in that jurisdiction. Since a state cannot afford to track the many individuals who do business on an itinerant basis, the ones targeted are usually high profile and very wealthy, namely professional athletes. Not only are the working schedules of famous sports players public, so are their salaries. The state can compute and collect the amount with very little investment of time and effort.
History
While "jock taxes" date to the 1960s, states started aggressively taxing the income of non-resident athletes in 1991, when California imposed the tax on the earnings of Chicago Bulls players who traveled to Los Angeles to play the Lakers in that year's NBA Finals. Illinois soon retaliated, imposing its own "jock tax" on out-of-state players—although Illinois' tax is only imposed on athletes from jurisdictions that impose jock taxes on Illinois-based players. Other states followed suit; by 2014, the only U.S. jurisdictions with major professional teams without a jock tax were Florida, Texas, Washington state, and Washington, D.C. A 2025 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling, however, declared Pittsburgh's NSFUF unconstitutional under Pennsylvania law, noting that other "noting that nonresident workers are not subject to the school tax" as the visiting athletes were.
In depth
The following is an in-depth analysis of modern-day examples and criticisms of the jock tax.
Examples
Alex Rodriguez
After the 2000 Major League Baseball season, Alex Rodriguez signed what was then the largest contract in American sports history, a ten-year contract worth $252 million, with the Texas Rangers. The tax collecting authorities of other states were notified alongside the public, and would separately demand that Rodriguez's employer withhold the tax due from his salary and remit it to each of them. Even though the state of Texas did not have an income tax, he still had to pay the various state income taxes applied to each away game in each location except for Florida, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington, D.C. (as an American League player, he would visit the three states every season). It is estimated that Rodriguez paid $520,000 a year for state income taxes outside his own state.
Tennessee "privilege tax"
Tennessee, which before 2021 had a limited income tax that excluded wages and salaries and now has no state income tax at all, began imposing its own special form of jock tax in July 2009, which it called a "privilege tax", and later repealed in April 2014. The tax was unique in several respects. First, it was a flat-rate tax of $2,500 per game, imposed on all players who were on a team's roster for a game in the state, including Tennessee residents. However, the tax applied to a maximum of three games per calendar year. while taxes imposed on NBA players went to the operators of FedExForum in Memphis, home to the Memphis Grizzlies (both teams are Tennessee's only representatives in their respective leagues). Finally, because the tax was categorized as a fee, it could not be claimed as a deduction on other states' tax returns. Another individual who was disproportionately affected by the tax was Chris Johnson, who earned $54,000 for eight games with the Grizzlies under two 10-day contracts in , but was still subject to the full $7,500 privilege tax—the same amount collected from Grizzlies players who were on the team for an entire calendar year.
<blockquote>Many trainers and scouts do not earn much more than the national median income, and players earning the league minimum in some leagues, such as Major League Soccer, earn only around $35,000 per year. This can lead to a substantial tax complexity burden because many team members have to file income taxes in around 15–20 states each year. ... the tax hits many people who may not be able to easily absorb the substantial compliance costs associated with the tax.</blockquote>
The aforementioned 2018 SI story further illustrated this complexity. Because the Dallas Cowboys split their 2017 training camp between Oxnard, California and Texas, wide receiver Dez Bryant was subject to $10,000 in state income tax for every day the team spent in Oxnard. In the same year, the Miami Dolphins trained in Oxnard in the days following Hurricane Irma, subjecting the team's on-site personnel to California's income tax for that period. Ndamukong Suh was subject to more than $50,000 in California income tax during this time. One unnamed 2016 All-Pro had federal, state, and city tax filings for that year that totaled 400 pages, and during the team's bye week went on a vacation to income tax-free Florida that saved him $20,000 in income taxes.