Compare military pay, BAH, GI Bill, TSP, and VA disability planning by state.
Use these state guides to compare location-specific military pay planning factors, including BAH markets, state tax treatment, education benefits, retirement planning, and VA disability notes. Your base pay is federal — identical in all 50 states — but where you're stationed and where you hold legal residence can swing your actual take-home by several hundred dollars a month.
State income tax is the biggest variable. Roughly half the states either have no income tax at all (Texas, Florida, Nevada, Washington, Tennessee, and four others) or fully exempt active-duty military pay from taxation (Illinois, Arizona, Arkansas, and a growing list — several states added exemptions in the last three legislative sessions). At the other end, California taxes resident service members' pay at full rates unless they're stationed outside the state all year, and a handful of northeastern states offer only partial breaks. For an E-6 with 10 years of service, the difference between a no-tax and a full-tax state of legal residence runs $1,500-$3,500 per year.
BAH varies even more. Housing allowance is set per Military Housing Area, not per state — California alone has 26 MHAs with E-5 with-dependents rates spanning from around $2,000 to over $4,500 a month. The BAH state pages below carry the full 2026 DTMO rate tables for every MHA, every pay grade, with and without dependents.
Retirement and veteran benefits diverge too. Whether your military retirement pay gets taxed, whether the state adds its own veteran property-tax exemption, and how state education benefits stack on the GI Bill are all state-level decisions covered in the guides. If you're weighing where to establish legal residence under SCRA — which lets you keep one state's tax treatment no matter where you PCS — these pages give you the side-by-side facts to make that call deliberately instead of by default.