By: Garrett Kilcer

In this post, I will be looking at some of the contracts that were signed by free agents in the NFL during the 2024 off season and comparing them against the income tax they would be paying in their respective states.

Moving Sucks

Moving is something a lot of us will do throughout our lives. Some will go off to college, some will just want to get a space away from their parents, or maybe our jobs will cause us to relocate. However which way it comes about, moving is a whole process. You need to find a new place to live, you need to rent a truck, pack up all your things, assess what actually needs to be kept and what can be thrown away, fight about that, drive all the way to your new home, sometimes you must wait a while for your stuff to get there, and that whole time you are paying for things you had no way of foreseeing before the process started. 

All of that is to say, moving is stressful for us normal folk. Now just imagine you play in the NFL and you have thousands of people on Twitter calling you a bum every waking second of your life. You can get traded mid-season while playing the team you got traded to. 

I just moved about a month ago. I now live in a state that has higher income taxes than where I was previously. I don’t mind all that much. I know that hopefully my money can go towards better roads, better community programs for children, or maybe funding a stadium for a billionaire that holds a team hostage, threatening a move of their own. 

I am a Buffalo Bills fan which means I am intimately familiar with the players on the team and their personalities. One of the players that has come through the system is Jordan Poyer. Jordan was a great player for us. He and Micah Hyde gave us (for my money) one of, if not, the best safety duo in the league for years. Going into the 2024 offseason though, Jordan Poyer’s contract was up and the Bills were tight on money so it seemed like he would test the waters of free agency.

This is where our story starts. Jordan Poyer went on a podcast and said that, when he was looking for a place to play, income taxes would play a huge roll in that¹. If he was looking for a place to play where there was no state income tax, there were a handful of teams he could play for. Ultimately, he did end up choosing the Miami Dolphins which meant that he would be able to collect his paycheck (state) tax free.

This obviously made me upset. One of the Bills best safeties in team history leaving because of something completely out of their control. Does that mean my team is at a disadvantage due to the tax law in New York state? Do I need to write a letter to Kathy Hochul? 

Well, I’m certainly not going to write a letter to someone but if there is one thing I can do, it’s look at a spreadsheet and graph some stuff.

My 2 Cents

Now, I’m not going to bury the lead here, I do not think teams that are located in states with high income taxes are at a disadvantage in free agency. Are some of the players thinking about it? I know at least one of them is and I am sure he isn’t the only one. But, I think it is more nuanced than that. Someone like Jordan Poyer, an All-Pro, probably can sit back and really weigh all his options when it comes to where he should sign and I totally understand.

In a business like the NFL, you do not usually get to decide where you get to go. You grow up in a town somewhere in the United States (usually) and then you have to leave that town to go play college football wherever you happen to get a scholarship. If you’re someone like Josh Allen and you grew up outside of Fresno, CA, that could mean packing up your life and moving everything to Laramie, WY. Then after college ball, you go into the draft and then go wherever you get selected. Did you spend the first 22 years of your life in Phoenix, AZ? Congrats you get to move to Foxborough, MA. Sure they make millions of dollars to do that move but it is still difficult.

Now you’re 30 years old and for your entire adult life you have been told where to move and when. Suddenly, after working your ass off in the league for 8 years, you get to decide what to do with your career and where you would like to move. If you are like Jordan Poyer and one of your thoughts is about income tax, so be it. I think he has earned at least that much. However, he is not your average NFL player.

The website Statista claims that the average NFL career is only 3.3 seasons long². Imagine you are a guy who got one scholarship offer and when the draft came around, you went undrafted. You will sign to any team willing to take you on, it does not matter the state they are located in. This is what you’ve bet your whole life on to this point. You’ve never had a plan B because making the NFL has been your dream since you were young. You go to training camp, you don’t make the final roster but another team offers you a practice squad position and you have to take it. You move all your stuff again to make it work. The season happens and someone gets injured and you’re able to play a few snaps but the first teamer comes back and you’re back on the bench. Now imagine you’re the one who got injured. You, while totally healthy, had such a hard time sticking to a roster. Now that you’re injured? Forget it, teams will never look your way again.

This is the reality for a majority of professional football players. It may not seem like that because the news is always about the best players at each position but there are 100s if not 1,000s of men vying for these positions on the fringes and they’ll go anywhere to make it work.

A Touch More Ado

I have yapped for long enough, here are the graphs I promised. All of the data here is from the 2024 NFL free agency cycle for players whose total salary is above $2 million. This is the cycle where Jordan Poyer signed in Miami. This is also the year Kirk Cousins moved from the Vikings to the Falcons but his dot on these graphs might not be there because he really skews the data given that he’s a quarterback. 

Some more notes about the tax rates that I use here. All tax rates were taken from³ and I used single filer brackets to determine the tax rates of the teams each player was leaving and coming to. Speaking of the rates, I judged each player by which state their team represents. Washington Commanders players get the DC tax rate, not Virginia or Maryland. Giants and Jets players pay the New York rate and not the New Jersey one. Panthers players pay the North Carolina rate even though the Panthers represent both Carolinas, they are located in Charlotte, NC. I do not know where these players live so that is just the criteria I used. If there is someone who plays for the Denver Broncos but commutes the 2 hours from Wyoming to get that sweet, sweet 0% income tax rate, I think that would be pretty incredible. 

The Part with the Graphs and Data

I know I just said I would stop yapping and then I yapped some more but this is where the graphs really start. First thing I wanted to look at was the tax rate change each player made in association with their average yearly salary. Rate change is on the x-axis where players that are now paying higher taxes are represented by negative numbers on the left and players that are paying less in taxes are represented by positive numbers on the right. The y-axis is their yearly average salary.

Before I saw the graph for myself, I assumed that maybe I would see more dots in the top left section of the graph. I figured that in order to get these players to pay more in taxes, you would need to increase their salary compared to someone who may take a slight pay cut to pay less taxes. Here is the graph, what do you see?

To me, I don’t see diddly squat. No correlation.

Here’s the next one. On this graph, the x-axis stays the same but I changed the y-axis from how much their deal is worth to how many years they signed on for. Maybe here is where we see players willing to stick around a place with better tax rates for longer.

Again, not seeing much here.

Another thing I thought about was guaranteed money. NFL contracts have bonuses for players if they hit certain numbers but most contracts have a certain amount of guaranteed money that they will make no matter what. Certainly these free agents require a higher percentage of guaranteed money in order to play for a team with high income taxes.

This is the first graph where you could say potentially. Just looking at the bottom of the graph, there does seem to be some positive correlation but when you break these numbers down into a bar chart…

There is no difference in the average percent of guaranteed money between 0% income tax and 10.75%.

There it is, there is no grand conspiracy against states with high income tax. The truth of the matter is this: the NFL is such a tough and demanding league that, whenever you are offered a spot, you have to take it because the next one is not guaranteed. If you do happen to make it to the position in the league where you are able to decide location and who you would like to play for, be my guest and take taxes into consideration. However, that is not a reality for most people who put the helmet on on Sundays.

Citations:

1. https://www.foxbusiness.com/sports/nfl-free-agent-jordan-poyer-isnt-fan-states-that-take-half-my-money
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/240102/average-player-career-length-in-the-national-football-league/#:~:text=The%20average%20length%20of%20a,perform%20at%20a%20high%20level.
3. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-income-tax-rates-2024/