With Tax Day fast approaching and the new tax code taking effect this year, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its 2019 Tax Burden by State report as well as accompanying videos, along with its 2019 Tax Facts infographic.
Louisiana ranked almost squarely in the middle at No. 24.
In order to determine which states tax their residents most aggressively, WalletHub compared the 50 states based on the three components of state tax burden — property taxes, individual income taxes, and sales and excise taxes — as a share of total personal income.
According to these metrics, Louisiana ratings were:
- Total tax burden was 8.5 percent
- Property tax burden equaled 2.08 percent, which was 43 out of 50.
- Individual income tax burden rated at 1.44 percent, which came in the bottom half at 39 out of 50.
- However, total sales and excise tax burden was tallied to 4.99 percent which was high enough to put them at No. 4 in the country.
Key findings in the report were:
- Americans spend 8.1 billion hours doing taxes each year. The average person spends 11 hours and $200 completing his or her 1040.
- 4.6 million fewer taxpayers will get a federal tax refund this year. The average refund in 2019 is $2,957, as of 3/15/2019.
- Nearly one-third of people say their biggest Tax Day fear is making a math mistake on their taxes, topping not having enough money (28 percent), identity theft (24 percent) and getting audited (17 percent).
- 50 percent of people would rather do jury duty than their taxes and more than 10 percent would swim with sharks, spend the night in jail and drink expired milk.
To view the full report and your state’s rank, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-burden/20494/