Oregon Taxes the Roster. California Taxes the Stars.

Two of the most expensive states in college football are Oregon and California. To deliver the same take-home pay to the same roster, a program in either one needs roughly 18% more gross NIL spend than a Texas program does — 18.12% in Oregon, 18.25% in California. Close enough that we won't rank them.

But that near-tie hides two completely different tax codes doing two completely different things.

For a player at the median TNS valuation of about $203,000, Oregon is substantially harsher: a 14.81% premium against California's 11.73%. Move up the roster and the gap closes, crosses, and then inverts violently. At the top of our tracked distribution, California charges a 27.50% premium and Oregon charges 19.70%.

The crossover sits at $652,590.

The mechanism is bracket geometry. Oregon's top marginal rate of 9.9% begins at $125,000 of taxable income — which means essentially every scholarship player on a Power Four roster is already in Oregon's highest bracket. It is a flat, broad squeeze across the whole roster. California's 13.3% doesn't arrive until $1,000,000, and everything underneath it is comparatively gentle. California barely notices a median player and takes an enormous bite out of a star.

Oregon taxes the roster. California taxes the stars. Both arrive at 18%.

Three shapes

Run the same exercise across all 36 states that host a program we track and the codes sort into three families.

Flat. Single-rate states — Illinois, Utah, Pennsylvania, Indiana — charge nearly the same premium on a walk-on and a Heisman contender. Illinois runs 8.19% at $100,000 and 8.99% at the top of the distribution. An 0.8-point spread across a 68x range of income.

Rising. Progressive states compound. California runs 8.92% at $100,000 and 27.50% at the top — more than tripling. New Jersey, New York and Minnesota do the same thing at smaller amplitude.

Step.Massachusetts is flat until it isn't. The state charges 7.65% at the median and then hits its millionaire surtax at $1,083,150, at which point the premium roughly doubles to 16.32%.

This is why a single “worst state for NIL taxes” table is the wrong artifact. Across our 36 states there are 39 pairs whose ordering reverses between the median player and the top of the roster, with crossover points ranging from $209,525 to $3,207,713. A ranking computed at one valuation is simply wrong at another.

The wedge is a star problem

The concentration follows directly from the shapes. In California, the top decile of a roster by valuation carries 44.38% of the program's entire state-tax premium. Minnesota is 40.87%. Oregon — the flattest of the three — is 37.37%, and that lower figure is the same fact as its flatter curve.

The practical reading: for most of a roster, state income tax is a rounding error in a recruiting conversation. For the handful of players at the top, it is a material line item. The tax wedge distorts star acquisition far more than it distorts roster construction, and a front office that treats it as a uniform cost of doing business in a state is modeling it wrong.

The layer nobody prices

State law is only the first layer. Thirteen of the 70 programs we track sit in jurisdictions that levy a local income tax on top, and in one case it changes everything.

On state law alone, Maryland is unremarkable — a 9.86% premium, ninth of 36. Prince George's County levies a 3.20% piggyback income tax on Maryland taxable income. Add it and Maryland's premium reaches 16.54%, higher than 34 of the 36 states in our data. A program that reads mid-pack on state law is, in practice, one of the three most expensive places in college football to pay a roster — and no state-level analysis can see it.

It also splits programs that share a state. Pennsylvania's two campuses sit 1.47 points apart because Pittsburgh's earned income tax is 3.00% and State College's is 2.25%. Ohio's two are 1.34 points apart on Columbus's 2.50% against Cincinnati's 1.80%. Identical state law, different bills.

The Iowa trap

Look at the bottom two rows and then at their nominal rates: Iowa City levies 4.00% and Ames levies 3.00% — the two largest local rates anywhere in the table. They produce the two smallest premiums.

Iowa's school district surtax is levied as a percentage of state income tax owed, not of income. A 4% Iowa surtax on a $500,000 valuation costs about $698. A 4% Ohio-style municipal rate on the same income costs $19,000. Twenty-seven times the money, same numeral.

Anyone who pulls a table of local rates and sorts it will conclude the Iowa campuses are the most heavily taxed in college football. They are the least. The rate is meaningless without its base, which is why we print the base everywhere we print a rate.

The zero-tax bloc, and one asterisk

Fourteen of the 70 programs we track owe no state income tax at all: seven in Texas, four in Florida, two in Tennessee, plus Washington. Arkansas is a fifteenth with an asterisk. Better than a fifth of the programs we cover sit at or near zero, which is what makes the wedge a competitive variable rather than a curiosity.

Arkansas is the only income-taxing state to have carved NIL out, and the carve-out is narrower than its reputation: Act 839 exempts income paid directly by the institution, which leaves collective and third-party endorsement money taxable. Because our valuations don't decompose into school-paid and collective-paid components, we model Arkansas as a range — a 0% premium if all compensation flows from the university, 6.66% if none of it does. The truth is somewhere between, and it moves with each program's revenue-share mix.

Mississippi's own exemption bill passed its House 76–32 and died in Senate Finance in March. Similar bills surfaced in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey and South Carolina without reaching a governor. If any of them lands, this map redraws.

Methodology

The premium answers one question: holding a player's take-home pay constant, how much more gross must a program in state X spend than a Texas peer?

We price every player in our tracked football population — 4,376 valuations, from $12,600 to $6,800,000, median $202,979 — in Texas first, then solve for the gross each other state requires to leave that same amount in hand. The anchor matters and is easy to get backwards: the Texas figure is held fixed and the state figure is solved forward. Anchoring the other way produces different, also-true numbers and different crossover points.

Every solve is per player. Federal brackets are progressive and the Social Security component of self-employment tax stops accruing at the 2026 wage base of $184,500, so effective rates move with income and a roster-level multiplier would be wrong in a direction that grows with deal size.

We follow the convention used in published NIL tax work: single filer, no dependents, all NIL income treated as self-employment income, a 5% allowance for agent, advisor, travel and marketing expenses netted before any tax line, and no standard deduction. Athletes are treated as residents of their campus jurisdiction — a load-bearing assumption where local tax applies, since Pittsburgh's non-resident rate is 1.00% against 3.00% for residents.

Federal parameters come from IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32. State brackets are as published for 2026. All thirteen local rates are taken from the levying authority's own publication rather than a secondary aggregator — a distinction that mattered: two of the thirteen rates would have been wrong, and two more would have been applied to the wrong base.

Two limits worth stating plainly. Our valuations are estimates of market value, not audited compensation; a small share is grounded in publicly reported deal terms and the remainder is modeled, so these are premiums on modeled compensation. And the calendar-year problem is real: NIL is paid on a school-year rhythm and taxed on a January-to-December one, so any single-season figure is a proxy rather than a return.

Every figure on this page is The NIL Standard's estimate of market value — not a disclosed salary, contract, or reported payment. See our methodology for how the figures are built.