Who Won The Super Bowl? California
The Washington Post has an interesting article about football and state income taxes:
"Winning a Super Bowl is a career-defining achievement for any NFL player. Yet California’s political leaders have managed to make victory bittersweet for everyone involved.
The Golden State’s top income tax rate of 13.3 percent is the highest in the country. Players on the winning team of Sunday’s game in Santa Clara will receive an extra $188,000 each, and players on the losing team are getting $113,000. Paying taxes on that may be no big deal for pro athletes, but they are also required to pay taxes based on the number of “duty days” they spend working in-state. For the Super Bowl, that’s usually about 10 days. . . .
Losing Patriots quarterback Drake Maye is only in his second year in the league, with a relatively low base salary and no allocatable bonus compensation. His California tax bill will be $20,363.
Victorious Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold has a California tax bill of at least $202,102, which is bigger than the default victory bonus. On top of that, his contract included an additional $4 million in bonuses to drive his tax bill even higher. . . .
Pro athletes pay accountants to figure out their taxes, but the same laws also apply to staffers who travel with the team and earn middle-class salaries. They get nickeled-and-dimed by different tax collectors through the regular season.
Most people ignore these laws, but 22 states say that working there for even one day means someone must file a tax return. Other states have enacted various thresholds below which someone does not have to file, or they don’t have an income tax at all."
And the article links to this helpful page from the Tax Foundation, with a map and details of how the states tax nonresident workers:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/nonresident-income-tax-filing/
